Vacuum Diagrams

Blue Shift

Blue shift!

My fragile ship hovered over the tangled complexity of the Great Attractor. From across a billion light years worlds and galaxies were tumbling into the Attractor’s monstrous gravity well, arriving so fast they were blue-shifted to the color of fine Wedgewood.

I could have stared at it all until my eyes ached. But I had a problem. Swirling round me like dark assassins’ hands were a hundred Xeelee ships. They would close on me within minutes.

My hand hovered over the control that would take me home — but I knew that the Qax, who had sent me to this fantastic place, were waiting there to kill me.

What a mess. And to think it had all come out of a sentimental journey to a breaker’s yard in Korea…

Of course I should have been looking for a job before my creditors caught up with me, not getting deeper into debt with travel costs. But there I was on the edge of that floodlit pit, watching gaunt machines peel apart the carcass of a doomed spaceship.

A wind whipped over the lip of the pit. The afternoon light started to fade; beyond the concrete horizon the recession-dimmed lights of Seoul began to glow. It was a desperate place. But I had to be there, because what they were breaking that day was the last human-built spacecraft. And my life…

A shadow moved over the pit; workmen paused and looked up as the mile-wide Spline ship drifted haughtily past the early stars. There was a Spline ship looming over every human city now, a constant reminder of the power of the Qax — the ships’ owners and our overlords.

The shadow moved on and the wrecking machines worked their way further into the ship’s corpse. Finally, after three centuries of Occupation, the Qax had shut down human space travel. The only way any human would leave the Solar System in the future was in the alien belly of a Spline. I began to think about finding a bar.

“Like watching the death of a living thing, isn’t it?”

I turned. An elegant stranger had joined me at the pit’s guard rail. Gray eyes glittered over an aquiline nose, and the voice was rich as velvet.

“Yeah,” I said, and shrugged. “Also the death of my career.”

“I know.”

“Huh?”

“You’re Jim Bolder.” The breeze stirred his ash-tinged hair and he smiled paternally. “You used to be a pilot. You flew these things.”

“I am a pilot. I don’t know you. Do I?” I studied him warily; he looked too good to be true. Did he represent a creditor?

He spread callus-free palms in a soothing gesture. “Take it easy,” he said. “I don’t want anything from you.”

“Then how do you know my name?”

“I’m here to make you an offer.”

I turned to walk away. “What offer?”

“You’ll fly again.”

I froze.

“My name’s Lipsey,” he said. “My… clients need a good pilot.”

“Your clients? Who?”

He glanced about the deserted apron. “The Qax,” he said quietly.

“Forget it.”

He exhaled sadly. “Your reaction’s predictable. But they’re not monsters, you know—”

“Who are you, Lipsey?”

“I… was… a diplomat. I worked with a man called Jasoft Parz. I helped negotiate our treaty with the Qax. Now I try to do business with them.”

I stared at him, electrified.

The Qax, during the long Occupation, had withdrawn Anti-Senescence technology. Death, illness, had returned to our worlds.

If he remembered Jasoft Parz, Lipsey must be centuries old. Unlike the rest of Occupied mankind, Lipsey was AS-preserved.

He saw the look on my face.

“I know it’s hard to sympathize, but I believe we have to be pragmatic. They’re just like us, you see. Looking out for number one, scrabbling for Xeelee artifacts—”

I jammed my hands in my pockets and turned away once more. “Maybe, but I don’t have to fly one of their damn Spline ships for them.”

“You don’t fly a Spline ship. Such strong opinions, and you don’t even know that? Spline ships fly themselves.”

“Then what’s the ship? Squeem?”

“Xeelee,” he said softly. “They want you to fly a Xeelee ship.” He smiled again, knowing he’d hooked me for sure.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

Lipsey shrugged, turning his face from the rising breeze. “The Xeelee fighter was found derelict — a long way from here. The Qax paid well for it.”

I laughed. “I’ll bet they did.”

“And they’ll pay you well for flying it.”

“Prove it exists.”

Furtively he dug inside his coat of soft leather and produced a plastic-wrapped package. “This was found aboard,” he said. “Take a look.”

I peeled back the packaging. Inside was a delicate handgun sculpted from a marblelike material. The butt was wrapped in a hair-thin coil. Fine buttons were inlaid into the barrel, too small for human fingers.

“Xeelee construction material.” Lipsey’s gray eyes were fixed on my face. “Controls built to the Xeelee’s usual small scale.”

“What is it?”

“We don’t know. There is synchrotron radiation when the thing’s operated at its lowest power setting, so the Qax think the coil around the butt is a miniature particle accelerator. They haven’t had the courage to try the higher settings.” His face lit up briefly at that. He put away the artifact and pulled his coat tight around him. “The ship’s in orbit around the Qax home sun. The Qax will tell you the rest when you get there. I’ve a flitter waiting at Seoul spaceport; we can leave straight away.”

“Just like that?”

He studied me with a frank knowledge. “You have someone to say goodbye to?”

“…No. I guess you know that. But tell me one thing. Why don’t the Qax fly the damn ship themselves?”

He stared at me. “Have you ever seen a Qax?”

A million years ago the race we call the Spline made a strategic decision.

They were ocean-going at that time, great whalelike creatures with articulated limbs. They’d already been space travelers for millennia.

Then they rebuilt themselves.

They plated over their flesh, hardened their internal organs… and left the surface of their planet, rising like mile-wide, eye-studded balloons. Now they’re living ships, feeding patiently on the thin substance that drifts between the planets.

Since then they’ve hired themselves out to fifty races, including the Qax; but since they’re not dependent on any one world, or star, or type of environment, they’re their own masters — and always will be.

But there are drawbacks… mostly for their passengers.

Our cabin was a red-lit hole scooped out of the Spline’s gut. Our journey to the Qax home world meant three days in that stinking gloom. It was like being swallowed.

As a precondition of accepting our commission, the Spline sold us each an emergency beacon. It was a sort of limp bracelet. “It’s a quantum-inseparability beacon. You work it by squeezing its mid-portion,” Lipsey said. “The Spline guarantee your rescue, anywhere within the Galaxy. Of course, the price of the rescue’s negotiable. Higher if you don’t want the Qax to know about it.”

“I don’t want this.”

He shrugged. “Have it on credit. You might need it one day.”

“Maybe.” I wrapped the bracelet around my wrist; it nestled into place like a living thing.

Disgusting. I missed human technology.

We entered orbit around the Qax planet.

Our air and water were re-absorbed by the cabin walls, then an orifice dilated and we passed through a bloody tube to space. The stars were clean and cold. I breathed freely for the first time since we’d left Earth.

Lipsey’s two-man flitter was extruded from another sphincter, and we spiraled over the Qax world. Under the murky atmosphere I saw a planet-wide ocean. Submerged volcano mouths glowed like coals. There were no cities, no lights. “It’s a goddamn swamp,” I concluded.

Lipsey nodded cheerfully, intent on his inexpert piloting. “Yes. It’s like the primeval Earth.”

“So where are the Qax? Undersea?”

“Wait and see.”

We landed and stepped out onto a spaceport, a metal island in a bubbling quagmire. Steam misted up my face plate. Lipsey lifted a suitcase-sized translator box down from the flitter. “Meet our client,” he said.

“Where?”

He smiled. “Here! All around you.”

The translator box woke up. “This is the human pilot we discussed?”

I jumped, whirled around. Nothing but swamp.

“Yes,” said Lipsey, his tone deep and reassuring. “This is Jim Bolder.”

“And this is really one of your best?” boomed the Qax.

I bristled. “Lipsey, what is this?”

He smiled, then stood beside me and pointed. “Look down there. What do you see?”

I stared. “Turbulent mud.” Hexagonal convection cells a hand’s breadth across, quite stable: the ocean was like a huge pan of boiling water.

Lipsey said: “All known forms of life are based on a cellular organization. But there are no rules about what form the cells have to take…”

I thought it over. “You’re telling me that those convection cells are the basis of the Qax biology?”

I stared at the sea, trying to perceive the limits of the mighty creature. I imagined I could see thoughts hopping over the rippling meniscus like flies…

“Can we proceed?” the Qax broke in. The box gave it an appropriate voice: deep-bellied, like an irritable god.

I tried to concentrate. “Show me the Xeelee ship,” I said.

“In time. Do you know what we want of you?”

“No.”

“What do you know of galactic drift?” the Qax began. “Your astronomers first detected it in your twentieth century…”

The galaxies are streaming.

Like a huge liner our Galaxy is soaring through space at several hundred miles a second. That’s maybe no surprise — until you learn that all the other galaxies, as far as we can see in any direction, are migrating, too. And they’re all heading for the same spot.

Standing there on that shiny island in a mud sea, I struggled with the scale of it all. Throughout a sphere a billion light years wide, galaxies are converging like moths to a flame.

But what is the flame? And — who lit it?

“We call it the Great Attractor,” said the Qax. “We know something about its properties. It is three hundred million light years from here. And it’s massive: a hundred thousand times the mass of our Galaxy, crammed into a region about half the Galaxy’s diameter.”

A cold mist settled over us; the Qax restlessly stirred its oceanic muscles. I felt like a flea on the back of a hippopotamus.

“We need to understand what is happening out there,” the Qax went on. “Now: we have trading contacts throughout the Local Cluster, and we’ve been analyzing sightings of Xeelee ships. We had the idea of trying to track down the Xeelee Prime Radiant — their source and center of activities. We have done so.”

“The Prime Radiant is at the center of the Galaxy,” I said.

Lipsey smiled thinly. “You’re not thinking big enough, Bolder. The Xeelee transcend any one Galaxy.”

I thought that through… and my mouth dried up. “You’re not suggesting,” I asked slowly, “that the Xeelee are responsible for the Great Attractor? That they’re building it?”

“We plan to send a probe to find out,” said the Qax. “Our captured Xeelee ship is the technology we need to cross such distances.”

“Which is where I come in?”

“Do you accept the commission, Bolder?”

“Yes,” I said immediately, staring fixedly at the translator box. To fly a Xeelee fighter to the center of everything… my only fear now was that I’d be turned down.

Lipsey interrupted smoothly: “Subject to a suitable fee, of course.” He smiled like a good agent.

Surrounded by the primeval murk, we began discussing powers of ten.

We returned to Lipsey’s flitter.

“Lipsey… why do the Qax care? What turns them on?”

“Short-term profit,” he said simply. “This is a young planet, not all that stable. Hot spots come and go, and individuals tend to be broken up quickly.

“As a result they don’t have a strong sense of self, and they find it hard to plan for — or even imagine — the future.” His face creased with wonder. “There are only a few hundred of them, you know, each of them miles across… but thanks to their peculiar biology their awareness and material control go right down to the molecular level. They’ve developed a high, miniaturized technology; it’s the basis of their commercial power. Of course,” he smiled, “they trade by proxy.”

I frowned. “We’re millions of years from a crisis over this Great Attractor. If they’re so shortlived, why spend so much on gathering data about it?”

“Profit. With a secret as big as this they can name their own price.”

We rendezvoused with a Spline craft, orbiting the Qax star. The Spline was a gunship. We scurried around huge walls covered with thirty-feet-wide scales, and I peered curiously into hundreds of weapon emplacements — and then, drifting through the Spline’s long shadow, we found the Xeelee ship.

A Xeelee nightfighter is a hundred-yard sycamore seed wrought in black. The wings sweep back from the central pilot’s pod, flattening and thinning until at their trailing edges they are so fine you can see the stars through them.

Lipsey caught me gawping. “Save it. You’ve seen nothing yet…”

The pilot’s pod was an open framework about my height. A human crash couch had been cemented inside it. I clambered through the skeletal hull and into the couch. The hull became a mesh of blackness around me that barely excluded the stars. “Kind of open,” I said.

Lipsey, watching from outside, laughed a bit unsympathetically. “Evidently the Xeelee don’t suffer from vertigo. Do you?”

I clamped the translator box to a strut above my head. Now the Qax spoke. “Study your controls, Bolder.”

“Right.” Set ahead of me and to my sides were three control panels, each briefcase-sized. Magnifying monitors showed me sequinlike control studs. Waldoes would let me work the panels by my sides, but there was no waldo for the third.

“The panels to your sides are for in-system flight,” said the Qax. “The third, before you, is for the hyperspace drive. The three panels were the only equipment found in this ship — apart from the synchrotron handgun.”

“I’m not getting that back?”

“The Qax think you’re dangerous enough as it is,” Lipsey said quietly.

The Qax continued: “We’ve worked out a setting to take you out to the Great Attractor. Just hit the red button, on the left of the third panel. Hit it again to come home.”

I ran a gloved finger over the surface of the third panel. Apart from the red button the panel was half-melted… unusable. I asked why.

“Of course,” the Qax explained acidly, “you’d never be tempted to steal a treasure like this, but…”

I slipped my hands into the waldo manipulators. The ship woke up. “So tell me how I fly this thing.”

The wings of the sycamore seed billowed out, a shaken blanket a hundred miles wide.

“The motive force comes from the structure of space itself,” the Qax explained. “The wings are sheets of discontinuity in space. The — healing up — of space drives the ship forward.”

I squeezed minutely. The wings trembled and the pod jerked. Lipsey and his flitter disappeared. “Try to restrain your monkey impulse to meddle,” said the Qax. “You’ve just traveled half a light second.”

I let go, fast.

“Now,” said the Qax. “A controlled pressure with your right index finger…”

All I’ve ever wanted to do is fly. I’ve given up everything else in life for it, I suppose… and now my wings pulsed like sheets of shadow as I flew around the Qax star at half the speed of light. I stared into the eye of a vacuole and, whooping, whizzed under the blue-shifted arch of a stellar flare.

Blue shift! I was traveling so fast that light itself seemed as sluggish as the Doppler-shifted noise of a passing train.

The Qax gave me my head. Probably the ship was fairly immune to accidents… even if I wasn’t.

“The Xeelee hyperdrive works on unconventional principles,” the Qax told me. “On your return, we’re not sure precisely where in our system you’ll arrive — but we know it will be a fixed distance from the sun.

“The mass of the ship and sun are the deciding factors. The more mass the ship has, the closer to the sun you’ll be placed.”

I flew out to that critical return orbit. I wasn’t surprised to find a Spline gunship, pitted with weapons that tracked me like eyes. Around the curve of the orbit was another gunship, and another. I swept out of the ecliptic plane, only to find more gunships. The Qax sun was encased by a sphere of them, completely staking out my return radius. “This must be costing you a fortune,” I said. “Why?”

Lipsey said elegantly: “Oh, they’re not scared of you, Bolder. But they wouldn’t like a hundred armed Xeelee to come swarming out of that ship instead of you, now would they?”

After two months’ training I felt ready. I skimmed out to the Spline-guarded radius and closed up my wings. Lipsey, once more alone with the Qax, said gently: “Good luck, Jim Bolder.”

“Yeah.” I hit the red button—

— and gasped as the hyperdrive jump made the Qax sun wink to nothingness. Below my feet appeared a compact yellow star, set in a sky crowded with stars and dust. I became aware of a trickle of clicks and pops as instruments clustered around me began to study the hurtling wonders.

“Wow!” I said.

“Bolder,” said the Qax, “skip the epithets and report.”

“I think I’m near the center of the Galaxy.”

“Good. That is—”

— another jump—

“ — according to plan.”

“Lethe.” The yellow sun had disappeared; now I hovered below a dumbbell-shaped binary pair. Great tongues of golden starstuff arced between the twin stars. The sky was darker; I must be passing through the Galaxy and out the other side—

— jump—

— and now I was suspended below the plane of the Galaxy itself; it was a Sistine ceiling of orange and blue, the contrasts surprisingly sharp—

— jump—

— and these jumps were coming faster; I watched a dwarf star scour its way over the surface of its huge red parent and that dim disc over there must be my Galaxy—

— jump—

— and now I was inside a massive star, actually within its pinkish flesh, but before I could cry out there was another—

— jump—

— and—

— jump — jump — jumpjumpjumpjump—

I closed my eyes. There was no inward sensation of motion; only a flickering outside my eyelids that told me of skies being ripped aside like veils.

“…Bolder! Can you hear me? Bolder—”

I took a breath. “I’m okay. It’s just — fast.” I risked another look. I was passing through a frothy barrage of stars and planets; beyond them sheets of galaxies moved past as steadily as roadside trees. I said slowly: “I must be making a megalight, or more, an hour. At this rate the journey will take about two weeks—”

“Yes,” Lipsey said. “We think the Xeelee have a range of hyperdrive capabilities. The standard intragalactic version is limited to a kilolight an hour, or thereabouts. Whereas this more powerful intergalactic model—”

I tumbled into the creamy plane of an elliptical Galaxy. I wailed and closed my eyes again.

Ten days later, the popping stars no longer bothered me. I guess you can get used to anything. Even the growing gray patch ahead of me — a cloud of objects around the Great Attractor — seemed less important than the itchy confines of my suit. In fact, I felt fine until a disc of sky directly behind me turned china blue…

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Objects that I’m leaving behind should be redshifted.”

“It’s nothing to do with your motion, Bolder,” the Qax explained. “The blue shift is gravitational. You’re now close enough to the Great Attractor that light from the outside Universe is beginning to fall more steeply down its gravity well.”

I checked my instruments. “But that’s ridiculous… I’m still millions of light years away.”

The Qax didn’t bother to respond.

Two more days. The light became a hail of hard blue as it plummeted after me into this pit in space. I entered the outskirts of the mist around the Great Attractor; it resolved into individual stars and what looked like bits of galaxies.

The muddled starlight bathing my cage began to flicker. I felt my heartbeat rising. The skies riffled past me like the pages of a great book, ever slower. Finally the ship stuttered to a halt.

“I’ve arrived,” I whispered. “I’m still inside the star mist.” I looked around, clutching the arms of my couch. “I’m in orbit around what looks like a small G-type star. But the sky’s crammed with streaming stars, hundreds of them close enough to show discs. It’s blue-tinted chaos.

“And — I can see something ahead. A bank of light beyond the mist.” My breath caught at the sheer scale of it all. “That’s the Great Attractor, right?”

“Don’t touch your controls until we tell you, Bolder,” the Qax murmured.

“What? Why not?”

“You’ve got company. To your left…”

A hoard of night-dark ships came soaring away from the Great Attractor and out into the star cloud. There were small fighters like mine, swirling in flocks like starlings. And here and there I saw cup-shaped freighters miles wide, cruising like eagles.

The sky was black with ships.

“Xeelee,” I breathed. “There must be millions of them. Well, you were right, Qax… But I don’t believe in coincidence. I haven’t stumbled across the only Xeelee fleet in the area. This star cloud must be swarming with them.”

“Follow them,” said the Qax.

“What?”

“Activate your drive. You’re a lot less likely to be noticed as one of a flock than as an individual.”

“…Yeah.” I spread my wings and banked sideways into the flock. Soon I was waddling along, a self-conscious duck among swans. Inside the waldoes my sweating fingers began to cramp up with the effort.

The fleet was heading for a young star. Through the crowd ahead of me I could see the star’s disc, its violet light diamond-hard. As we neared the star the torrent of ships abruptly splashed sideways, as if encountering an invisible shield. When I reached the breaking radius I banked left and set off after the herd.

Twenty hours after my arrival the Xeelee completed their formation. With wings folded like patient vultures they completely surrounded the star.

“What now?” I asked uneasily.

“No doubt we’ll find out.”

I wished I could rub my gritty eyes. “Qax… I haven’t slept since coming out of hyperspace, you know.”

“Take a stimulant.”

Sudden as an eye blink, bloodred threads of light snaked into the star from every ship in the fleet.

Well, from every ship except one. Mine.

It was a poignant sight: a stellar Gulliver, pierced by a million tiny arrows. The star’s light flickered, oddly. And I became aware of a stirring in the ranks of the Xeelee nearest me.

“They’re starting to notice me,” I whispered. “How do I turn on my beam?”

“You don’t,” said Lipsey. “Remember that Xeelee handgun? This must be what happens at the highest setting.”

A purple arch of tortured gas erupted from the star. Soon flares covered the star’s surface; clouds of ejecta drifted through the cherry-red beams. Cup freighters moved in, placidly swallowing the star flesh.

It was like watching the death of a magnificent animal. “They’re destroying it,” I said. “But how?”

“The handgun must be a gravity wave laser,” the Qax said slowly. “The coils on the butt of that handgun are small synchrotrons. Subatomic particles move at fantastic velocities in there; the thing emits a coherent beam of gravity waves which—”

“I thought you needed large masses to get significant gravity waves.”

“No. As long as you move a small mass fast enough… the energy must come from the same source as your ship’s — from the structure of space itself.”

“Handguns to break stars, eh?”

A shadow moved across my vision. I glanced about quickly. A dozen Xeelee slid across the blue-shifted sky and gathered into a close sphere around me.

“They’ve noticed me.” Rapidly I thought over my options. Before me was the reassuring red glow of the hyperspace button: my escape hatch, if things got too hot… but, I quickly decided, I’d come too far to go home without seeing the Great Attractor itself.

I spread my wings as far as they would go and dragged them downwards in one mighty swoop. I shot head first out of the closing trap and kept going, heading deeper into the blue-tinged star cloud. My breath was loud in my helmet.

“What now?” I gasped.

“Run!” said Lipsey.

I ran for hours. I dodged stars only light minutes apart, their surfaces distorted into surreal shapes by their proximity to each other. The bank of grayish light beyond the mist grew remorselessly brighter and wider — and all the time the Xeelee formation was a spear pointing at my shoulderblades.

At last, abruptly, I burst out of the star mist. The naked light ahead was dazzling. Heart thumping, I wrenched at the wings and skidded to a halt. I found myself in a region clear of stars and debris… and the curtain of stars on the other side was tinged blue.

So I was at the center. The bottom of the pit; the place all the stars were falling into. And at the heart of it all, flooding space with a pearly light, was the Great Attractor itself.

It was a loop, a thing of lines and curves, a construct of some immense cosmic rope. My nightfighter was positioned somewhere above the plane of the loop. The near side of the construct formed a tangled, impenetrable fence, twisted exuberantly into arcs and cusps, with shards of galaxy images glittering through the morass of spacetime defects. And the far side of the object was visible as a pale, braided band, remote across the blue-shifted sky.

And it was — astonishingly, unbearably — a single object, an artifact, at least ten million light years across.

The rough disc of space enclosed by the artifact seemed virtually clear.

…Clear, I saw as I looked more carefully, save for a single, glowing point of light, right at the geometric center of the loop.

“Qax,” I croaked. “Speak to me.”

“A massive rotating toroid,” murmured the Qax. “A made thing, of cosmic string. The Xeelee have manipulated one-dimensional space-time discontinuities, just as — in their night-fighter intrasystem drive — they manipulate two-dimensional discontinuities.”

Lipsey said, “I didn’t imagine anything like this. A ring, an artifact of cosmic string. As large as a giant galaxy. The audacity…”

“But — why? What’s the point?”

The Qax paused. “Well, this fits one of our hypotheses. Look in the central region, Bolder.”

The hole in the ring hurt my eyes. It was a sheet of space that was somehow — tilted. I saw muddled space, stars streaked like cream in coffee.

“Do you know about the Kerr metric?” asked the Qax. “No? The Great Attractor is a massive toroid rotating extremely quickly. Your own theory of relativity predicts some odd effects with such a structure. There may be closed lines in space and time, for instance—”

“Come again?”

“Time travel,” said Lipsey. “And more… Bolder, the Kerr metric describes Interfaces between Universes. Do you understand? It’s as if—”

“What?”

“As if the Xeelee don’t like this Universe, so they’re building a way out.”

I focused my monitors on the dust that walled the cavity in the stars. I saw ships — an aviary of all shapes and sizes, uncountable trillions of them.

A few light minutes from me I made out a particularly monstrous ship, a disc that must have been the size of Earth’s Moon. Hundreds of cup freighters nestled into neat pouches in the disc’s upper surface, dumping out stolen star material. Vents in the underside of the main ship emitted a constant rain of immense crystalline shafts, as if it were some huge sieve leaking rainwater.

Peering deeper into the mist of craft I could see fantastic bucket-chains of the disc-ships descending to the Great Attractor, dwindling to pinpoints against the vast carcass of the ring. Returning ships, I saw, were diverted to clouds of cup freighters for reloading.

I began to see the pattern. “So the disc-ships are huge, ah, dumper trucks,” I said. “They’re tending the Great Attractor, bringing it matter and energy. Using that crystalline stuff to grow the string, knitting it together strand by strand, with a patience that’s lasted billions of years…”

There was a flicker in my peripheral vision. My posse. They whirled around me and began to close up once more.

I closed up my wings and prepared to punch the red button. “Lipsey, I’ve seen enough. We’ve got to spread this news around all the races in our region — find a way to stop the Xeelee before they wreck our Universe. We’ve time to plan—”

He coughed apologetically. “Ah — look, Bolder, this information is Qax commercial property. You know that.”

I hesitated. “You’re kidding. We’re doomed if the Qax keep this knowledge to themselves.”

He sighed. “The Qax don’t think on those timescales. They can’t, remember. They think about profit, today.”

I forced my hand away from the escape button; a cold knot in my stomach started to tighten. Suddenly this wasn’t a game. If I tried to go home after what I’d just blurted out, the Qax wouldn’t hesitate to use their Spline warships to blast me out of the sky. Abruptly my isolation telescoped into a vivid reality, and the cage around me seemed absurdly fragile… And the Xeelee whirled tighter, reminding me that hanging around here wasn’t an option either.

I had to find more time. To my right, obscured now by the fog of fighters around me, was that dumper truck with its attendant freighters. I opened up my wings, clutched at space and lurched out of the trap. Soon I was thrusting my way into the crowded freighter formation, my wings tucked tight. The fighters blurred after me.

I rammed thoughts through my sleep-starved brain as I flew. Could I evade the waiting Spline? Maybe I could divert the ship’s hyperspace flight — but how? Prise open the melted control box? Change the ship’s mass, to change the distance I arrived from the Qax sun?

Of course I could abandon ship before I reached the Qax system, at one of the later jump points. I had that Spline emergency beacon; I’d be picked up. And if I kept quiet I could hide from the Qax, for years maybe…

But, damn it, if I did that humanity and a few hundred other races would one day end up falling into the Xeelee pit. Hiding wasn’t good enough.

I dipped under the lip of the dumper truck and dodged the processed Great Attractor material sleeting from the truck’s base. The huge icicles fell a few thousand miles and then broke up into a fine mist… and as I stared abstractedly at that mist I realized there was a way out of this. It was stupid, crazy, nearly unworkable. And my only chance.

“All right, Qax,” I said. “I’ll come home. But first…”

I dropped, spread my wings as far as they would go and whirled like a seagull through the crystal rain. The wings plated over rapidly and grew stiff and cumbersome.

“Bolder, what are you doing?”

“Wrecking this beautiful ship,” I told Lipsey with real regret.

The Xeelee fighters finally closed around me, shutting out the rain.

I pressed the button.

The Xeelee trap disappeared; I’d jumped back to the blue-tinged light of the star cloud. And then—

Jump. Jump. Jump — jump — jump — jumpjumpjump—

The skies became a blur. I slumped into sleep.

I fell towards the welcoming pool that was my home Galaxy. I peered out of my glazed-over cage as the stars’ flickering began to slow. For the first time in a month I unbuckled the straps that bound me to my couch, and prized the translator box free of the strut over my head.

Lipsey and I said our goodbyes. “Do me a favor,” I said. “Whatever happens, keep talking. Tell me what you see.”

“Whatever you say.” I imagined his noble face gazing out over the seething Qax ocean. “Bolder… I want you to know I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” The ship — jumped — to the dumbbell binary system. It was dazzling; I’d arrived much closer than I remembered from my visit on the way out. I bunched a gloved fist in triumph. This was going to work—

— jump—

A compact yellow star at the heart of the Galaxy, searingly close to the ship. Last stop. Time to get out.

I climbed onto my seat, put my shoulders against the pod’s crystalline plating, and pushed. For a heart-stopping moment I thought the shell was too strong — then it crumbled, and I popped into space, clutching my translator box. Below me glittered the crusted wings of the ship I’d taken so far.

My plan had worked. The Great Attractor substance had added enough mass to the ship to shift its arrival point significantly closer to the system center. Now I had to rely on the Qax to do the rest—

— jump—

— and the ship disappeared and I was left alone in a cloud of fragments; they sparkled in the light of the compact star.

I drifted there for a while, rotating slowly. Then I squeezed the Spline distress bracelet. It turned rigid and cold.

Lipsey began to speak out of the translator box. His voice was hoarse, forced. I listened, absently picking sparkling fragments out of the space around me and stuffing them into a suit pocket.

“You haven’t come out where we expected, Bolder. What have you… you’re causing the Qax a lot of confusion, I can tell that much…”

A pause. “I think they’ve found you… but what are you doing there?”

The Spline warships rotated like eyeballs, scouring space…

Then they found my ship, inexplicably close to the Qax sun.

The Qax panicked. They sent their shell-shaped armada roaring in towards their sun. Waves of energy pounded the Xeelee ship; the great wings sagged like melting chocolate. And in the middle of that torrent of energy was a thread of cherry-red light that arrowed through the wreck and into the sun.

As I’d hoped, in their anxiety and confusion the Qax had thrown at my ship all they had — including their only Xeelee weapon.

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.”

“And what profits could be made from it,” I said dryly. “Right? And the second reason?”

“The Silver Ghosts think it’s important. And what they’re interested in, I’m interested in.”

That made me cough on my wine. “How do you know what the Ghosts are up to?”

His grin was suddenly boyish. “I’ve got my contacts. And they tell me the Ghosts are sending a ship.”

I choked again. “Across fifteen billion lights? I don’t believe it.”

“It’s a fast ship.”

“Yeah…” I thought it through further. “And how could such a ship report back?”

Wyman shrugged. “A quantum-inseparability link?”

“Wyman, the attenuation over such distances would reduce any data to mush.”

“Maybe,” he said cheerfully. “In conversational mode anyway. I hear the Ghosts are planning a high-intensity packet burst device. Would that get through?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps. You still haven’t told me why you’re talking to me.”

Abruptly he leaned forward. “Because you’ve the expertise.”

I flinched from his sudden intensity.

“You’ve no family. You’re fit. And the youthful idealism that trapped you in research has long worn off — hasn’t it? — now that your contemporaries are earning so much more in other fields. You need money, Doctor. I have it.”

Then he sipped coffee.

“I’ve the expertise for what?” I whispered.

“I’ve got my own ship.”

“But the Ghosts—”

He grinned again. “My ship’s got a secret… a supersymmetry drive. The Susy drive is a human development. A new one, can you believe it? The Ghosts don’t have it. So my ship’s faster, and we’ll beat them.”

“For Lethe’s sake, Wyman, I’m an academic. I’ve never even flown a kite.”

A cheese board floated by; he cut himself precise slices. “The ship will fly itself. I want you to observe.”

I felt as if I were falling. I tried to think it out. “…Tell me this, Wyman. Will there be any penalty clauses in my contract?”

He looked amused. “Such as?”

“For not getting there first.”

“What’s going to beat the Susy drive?”

“A Xeelee nightship.”

Expressions chased across his face.

“All right, Doctor. I accept your point. The Xeelee are one of the parameters we have to work within. There’ll be no penalty clauses.”

Above my head the Restaurant’s geostationary anchor congealed out of starlight into a mile-wide cuboid.

“Now the details,” Wyman said. “I want you to make a stop on the way, at the home world of the Ghosts…”

Wyman’s “ship” was a man-sized tin can.

It was stored in an open garage on the space-facing side of the Elevator Anchor. The thing’s cylindrical symmetry was broken by strap-on packages: I recognized a compact hyperdrive and an intrasystem drive box. Set in one wall was a fist-sized fusion torus.

Wyman pointed out a black, suitcase-sized mass clinging to the pod’s base. “The Susy drive,” he said. “Neat, isn’t it?”

I found half the hull would turn transparent. The interior of the pod was packed with instrument boxes, leaving precious little room for me.

I studied the pod with mild distaste. “Wyman, you expect me to cross the Universe… in this?”

He shrugged delicately. “Doctor, this is the best my private capital could fund. I’ve not had a cent of support from any human authority. Governments, universities, so-called research bodies… in the shadow of the Xeelee mankind is suffering a failure of imagination, Luce. We live in sorry times.”

“Yeah.”

“And that’s why I’ve set up a meeting with the Ghosts on the way out. This flying coffin isn’t much, but at least it demonstrates our intent. We’re going for the prize. Perhaps it will persuade the Ghosts that we should pool our resources.”

“Ah. So this pod is really a bargaining counter… you don’t mean it to make the journey after all?” I felt a mixture of relief — and profound regret.

“Oh, no,” Wyman said. “What I told you is true. I sincerely believe the Susy drive could beat the Ghosts to the prize. If necessary. But why not spread the risk?” He grinned, his teeth white in the gloom of his helmet.

I left a day later.

Our Universe is an eleven-dimensional object. All but four of those dimensions are compactified — rolled up to an unimaginable thinness. What we call hyperspace is one of those extra dimensions.

The hyperdrive module twisted me smoothly through ninety degrees and sent me skimming over the surface of the Universe like a pebble over a pond.

Of course, I felt nothing. Hyperspace travel is routine. With the pod’s window opaqued, it was like riding an elevator. I was left with plenty of time to brood. When I checked the pod’s external monitors I could see the Susy-space module clinging to the hull, dormant and mysterious.

After five days, with a soft impact, the pod dropped back into four-space.

I turned on my window. I was rotating slowly.

The sun of the Silver Ghosts is in the constellation of Sagittarius. Now it slid past my window, huge and pale. I could see stars through its smoky limb. Something came crawling close around that limb, a point of unbearable blue. It dragged a misty wave out of the sun.

I knew the story of the Ghosts. That blue thing was the main sun’s twin. It was a pulsar; it sprayed gusts of heavy particles across the sky six hundred times a second. Over a billion years that unending particle torching had boiled away the main star’s flesh.

The intrasystem drive cut in with a dull roar, a kick in the small of my back.

Then the planet of the Silver Ghosts floated into view.

I heard myself swearing under my breath. It was a world dipped in chrome, reflecting the Universe.

I was flying over a pool of stars. Towards the edge of the pool the stars crowded together, some smeared into twinkling arcs, and the blanched sun sprawled across one pole. As I descended my own image was like a second astronaut, drive blazing, rising from the pool to meet me.

Now I saw what looked like the skeleton of a moon, floating around the limb of the world. I directed monitors toward it. “Wyman. What do you make of that?”

Wyman’s voice crackled out of the inseparability link. “That’s where they built their ship to the lithium-7 event. They hollowed out their moon and used its mass to boost them on their way.”

“Wyman… I hate to tell you this, but they’ve gone already.”

“I know.” He sounded smug. “Don’t worry about it. I told you, we can beat them. If we need to.”

I continued to fall. The pod began speaking to the Ghosts’ landing control systems. At last the perfection of the planet congealed into graininess, and I fell amongst silvered clouds. The landscape under the clouds was dark: I passed like a firefly, lighting up cities and oceans.

Under the Ghosts’ control I landed in a sweep, bumping.

I rested for a moment in the darkness. Then—

I heard music. The ground throbbed with a bass harmonization that made the pod walls sing. It was as if I could hear the heart of the frozen planet.

I lit an omnidirectional lamp.

Mercury droplets glistened on a black velvet landscape. I felt as if I were brooding over the lights of a tiny city. There were highlights on the horizon: I saw a forest of globes and half-globes anchored by cables. Necklaces swooped between the globes, frosted with frozen air…

When their sun decayed the only source of heat available to the Ghost biosphere was the planet’s geothermal energy. So the Ghosts turned themselves and their fellow creatures into compact, silvered spheres, each body barely begrudging an erg to the cold outside.

Finally clouds of mirrored life-forms rolled upwards. The treacherous sky was locked out… but every stray photon of the planet’s internal heat was trapped.

“I don’t get it, Michael,” Wyman said. “If they’re so short of heat why aren’t they all jet-black?”

“Because perfect absorbers of heat are perfect emitters as well,” I said. “High school physics, Wyman. While perfect reflectors are also the best heat containers. See?”

“…Yeah. I think so.”

“And anyway, who cares about the why of it? Wyman, it’s… beautiful.”

“I think you’ve got a visitor.”

A five-foot bauble had separated from the forest and now came flying over the sequined field. In its mirrored epidermis I could see my own spectral face. Taped to that hide was a standard translator box. A similar box was fixed to the pod floor; now it crackled to life. “You are Dr. Michael Luce. I understand you represent a Wyman, of Earth. You are welcome here,” said the Silver Ghost. “I work with the Sink Ambassador’s office.”

“The Sink?” I whispered.

“The Heat Sink, Luce. The sky. I am Wyman. Thank you for meeting us. Do you know what I wish to discuss?”

“Of course. Our respective expeditions to the lithium site.” The truncated spheroid bobbed, as if amused. “We can make an educated guess about what you seek to achieve here, Mr. Wyman. What we do not know yet is the price you’ll ask.”

Wyman laughed respectfully.

I felt bewildered. “Sorry to butt in,” I said, “but what are you talking about? We’re here to discuss a pooling of resources. Aren’t we? So that humans and Ghosts end up sharing—”

The Ghost interrupted gently. “Dr. Luce, your employer is hoping that we will offer to buy him out. You see, Wyman’s motivation is the exploitation of human technology for personal profit. If he proceeds with your expedition he has the chance of unknown profit at high risk. However, a sell-out now would give him a fat profit at no further risk.”

Wyman said nothing.

“But,” I said, “a sell-out would give the Ghosts exclusive access to the lithium knowledge. All that creation science you told me about, Wyman… I mean no offense,” I said to the Ghost, “but this seems a betrayal of our race.”

“I doubt that is a factor in his calculation, Doctor,” said the Ghost.

I laughed dryly. “Sounds like they know you too well, Wyman.”

“So what’s your answer?” Wyman growled.

“I’m afraid you have nothing to sell, Mr. Wyman. Our vessel will arrive at the lithium-7 site in…” A hiss from the translator box. “Fourteen standard days.”

“See this ship? It will be there in ten.”

The Ghost was swelling and subsiding; highlights moved hypnotically over its flesh. “Powered by your supersymmetry drive. We are not excited by the possibility that it will work—”

“How can you say that?” I snapped, my pride obscurely wounded. “Have you investigated it?”

“We have no need to, Doctor. Our ship has a drive based on Xeelee principles. Hence it will work.”

“Oh, I see. If the Xeelee haven’t discovered something, it’s not there to be discovered. Right? Well, at least this shows mankind isn’t alone in suffering a fracture of the imagination, Wyman.”

The Ghost, softly breathing vacuum, said nothing.

“We humans aren’t so complacent,” snapped Wyman. “The Xeelee aren’t omnipotent. That’s why we’ll have the edge over the likes of you in the end.”

“A convincing display of patriotism,” said the Ghost smoothly.

“Yeah, that’s a bit rich, Wyman.”

“You’re so damn holy, Luce. Let me tell you, the Ghost’s right. This trip is risky. It’s stretched me. Unless you come up with the goods I might have trouble paying your fee. Chew on that, holy man.”

“Dr. Luce, I urge you not to throw away your life on this venture.” The Ghost’s calm was terrifying.

There was a moment of silence. Suddenly this world of mirrors seemed a large and strange place, and my own troubled eyes stared out of the Ghost’s hide.

“Come on, Luce,” said Wyman. “We’ve finished our business. Let’s waste no more time here.”

My drive splashed light over the chrome-plated landscape. I kept my eyes on the Ghost until it was lost in a blanket of sparkles.

I soared out of the gravity well of the Ghost world.

“Strap in.”

“Disappointed, Wyman?”

“Shut up and do as I say.”

The drive cut out smoothly, leaving me weightless. The control screens flickered as they reconfigured. Thumps and bangs rattled the hull; I watched my intrasystem and hyperdrive packs drift away, straps dangling.

The pod was metamorphosing around me.

I locked myself into a webbing of elasticated straps, fumbling at buckles with shaking fingers. There was a taste of copper in my throat.

“Do you understand what’s happening?” Wyman demanded. “I’m stripping down the pod. Every surplus ounce will cost me time.”

“Just get on with it.”

Panels blew out from the black casing fixed to the base of the pod; a monitor showed me the jeweled guts of the Susy drive.

“Now, listen, Luce. You know the conversational inseparability link will cut out as soon as you go into Susy-space. But I’ll be — with you in spirit.”

“How cheering.”

The pod shuddered once — twice — and the stars blurred.

“It’s time,” Wyman said. “Godspeed, Michael—”

The antique expression surprised me.

Something slammed into the base of the pod; I dangled in my webbing. For as long as I could I kept my eyes fixed on the Ghost world.

I lit up a hemisphere.

Then the planet crumpled like tissue paper, and the stars turned to streaks and disappeared.

Wyman had boasted about his Susy drive. “Hyperspace travel is just a slip sideways into one of the Universe’s squashed-up extra dimensions. Whereas with supersymmetry you’re getting into the real guts of physics…”

There are two types of particles: fermions, the building blocks of matter, like quarks and electrons, and force carriers, like photons. Supersymmetry tells us that each building block can be translated into a force carrier, and vice versa.

“The supersymmetric twins, the s-particles, are no doubt inherently fascinating,” said Wyman. “But for the businessman the magic comes when you do two supersymmetric transformations — say, electron to selectron and back again. You end up with an electron, of course — but an electron in a different place…”

And so Wyman hoped to have me leapfrog through Susy-space to the lithium-7 object. What he wasn’t so keen to explain was what it would feel like.

Susy-space is another Universe, laid over our own. It has its own laws. I was transformed into a supersymmetric copy of myself. I was an s-ghost in Susy-space. And it was… different.

Things are blurred in Susy-space. The distinction between me, here, and the stars, out there, wasn’t nearly as sharp as it is in four-space.

Can you understand that?

Susy-space is not a place designed for humans. Man is a small, warm creature, accustomed to the skull’s dark cave.

Susy-space cut through all that.

I was exposed. I could feel the scale of the journey, as if the arch of the Universe were part of my own being. Distance crushed me. Earth and its cozy Sun were a childhood memory, lost in the grief of curved space.

Eyes streaming, I opaqued the window.

I slept for a while. When I woke, things hadn’t got any better.

Trying to ignore the oppressive aura of Susy-space I played with the new monitor configurations, looking for the Susy-drive controls. It took me two hours of growing confusion to work out that there weren’t any.

The Susy drive had been discarded after pushing me on my way, like a throwaway rocket in the earliest human flights.

I could see the logic of it. Why carry excess baggage?

There were two problems.

The trip was one way. And Wyman hadn’t told me.

I’m not a strong man; I don’t pretend to be. It took some time to work through my first reaction.

Then I washed my face and sipped a globe of coffee.

The translator box lit up. “Luce. What’s your status?”

I crushed the globe; cooling coffee spurted over my wrist. “Wyman, you bastard. You’ve hijacked me… And I thought the inseparability link wouldn’t work over these distances.”

“We have a packet link; but apart from that, it doesn’t. This isn’t Wyman. I’m a Virtual representation stored in the translator box. I should think you’re pleased to hear my voice. You need the illusion of company, you see. It’s all quite practical. And this is a historic trip. I wanted some small part of me to be out there with you…”

I breathed hard, trying to control my voice. “Why didn’t you tell me this trip was no return?”

“Because you wouldn’t have gone,” said the Wyman Virtual — mentally I started calling him “sWyman.”

“Of course not. No matter what the fee. — And what about my fee? Have you paid it over yet?”

sWyman hesitated. “I’d be happy to, Michael. But… do you have an estate? Dependents?”

“You know I don’t. Damn you.”

“Look, Michael, I’m sorry if you feel tricked. But I had to make sure you’d take the trip. We have to put the interests of the race first, don’t we?…”

After that my courage began to fail once more. sWyman had the decency to shut up.

We popped out of Susy-space, sparkling with selectrons and neutralinos.

My time in that metal box had seemed a lot longer than ten days. I don’t remember a lot of it. I’d been locked inside my head, looking for a place to hide from the oppression of distance, from the burden of looming death.

Now I breathed deeply; even the canned air of the pod seemed sweet out of Susy-space.

I checked my status. I’d have four days’ life support at the lithium-7 site. It would expire — with me — just when the Ghosts arrived. Wyman had given me the bare bones.

I de-opaqued my window and looked out. I was spinning lazily in an ordinary sky. There was a powdering of stars, a pale band that marked a galactic plane, smudges that were distant galaxies.

Earth was impossibly far away, somewhere over the horizon of the Universe. I shivered. Damn it, this place felt old.

There was something odd about one patch of sky. It looked the size of a dinner plate at arm’s length. There were no stars in the patch. And it was growing slowly.

I set up the monitors. “sWyman — what is it?”

“All I see is a dull infra-red glow… But that’s where the lithium object is hiding, so that’s the way we’re headed.”

The patch grew until it hid half the sky.

I started to make out a speckled effect. The speckles spread apart; it was as if we were falling into a swarm of bees. Soon we reached the outskirts of the swarm. A hail of huge objects shot past us and began to hide the stars behind us—

“They’re ships.”

“What?”

I straightened up from my monitor. “Ships. Millions of ships, sWyman.”

I swung the focus around the sky. I picked out a little family of cylinders, tumbling over each other like baby mice. There was a crumpled sphere not much bigger than the pod; it orbited a treelike structure of branches and sparkling leaves. Beyond that I made out bundles of spheroids and tetrahedra, pencils of rods and wands — my gaze roved over a speckling of shape and color.

I was at the heart of a hailstorm of ships. They filled the sky, misting into the distance.

But there was no life, no purposeful movement. It was a desolate place; I felt utterly alone.

I looked again at the tree-thing. The delicate ship was miles wide. But there were scorch marks on the leaves, and holes in the foliage bigger than cities.

“sWyman, these are wrecks. All of them.”

A motion at the edge of my vision. I tried to track it. A black, birdlike shape that seemed familiar—

“Luce, why the junk yard? What’s happened here?”

I thought of a shell of lithium-stained light growing out of this place and blossoming around the curve of the Universe. At its touch flocks of ships would rise like birds from the stars… “sWyman, we’re maybe the first to travel here from our Galaxy. But races from further in, closer to this event, have been flooding here from the start. As soon as the lithium-7 light reached them they would come here, to this unique place, hoping as we hope to find new understanding. They’ve been seeking the lithium treasure for billions of years… and dying here. Let’s hope there’s still something worth dying for.”

Something was growing out of the speckled mist ahead. It was a flattened sphere of blood-colored haze; starlight twinkled through its substance.

It was impossible to guess its scale. And it kept growing.

“sWyman. I think that’s another ship. It may not be solid… but I know we’re going to hit. Where’s my intrasystem drive?”

“Fifteen billion light years away.”

There was detail in the crimson fog, sparks that chattered around rectangular paths. Now the huge ship shut off half the sky.

“Lethe.” I opaqued the window.

There was a soft resistance, like a fall into a liquid. Red light played through the pod walls as if they were paper. Sparks jerked through right angles in the air.

Then it was over. I tried to steady my breath.

“Why worry, Michael?” sWyman said gently. “We’ve no power; we’re ballistic. If another of those babies runs into us there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

“It’s getting clearer up ahead.”

We dropped out of the mist of ships and shot into a hollow space the size of the Solar System. On the far side was another wall of processed matter — more ships, I found. There was a sphere of smashed-up craft clustering around this place like gaudy moths.

And the flame at the heart of it all?

Nothing much. Only a star. But very, very old…

Once it had been a hundred times the mass of our sun. It had squirted lithium-7 light over the roof of the young cosmos. It had a terrific time. But the good days passed quickly. What we saw before us was a dried-up corpse, showing only by its gravity signature.

Just an old star… with something in orbit around it.

I focused my instruments. “That thing’s about a foot across,” I recorded. “But it masses more than Jupiter…”

The monstrous thing crawled past the surface of its wizened mother, raising a blood-red tide.

“So what? A black hole?”

I shook my head. “The densities are wrong. This is a different ball game, sWyman. That stuff’s quagma.”

The largest piece of quagma I’d had to work with before had been smaller than a proton. This was my field, brought within miraculous reach. I stammered observations—

Things started to happen.

The quagma thing veered out of orbit and shot towards us. I watched in disbelief. “It’s not supposed to do that.”

I felt a tingle as it hurtled past, mere yards from my window. It looked like a lump of cooling charcoal. Its gravity field slapped the pod as if it were a spinning top, and centripetal force threw me against the wall.

Clinging to the window frame I caught a glimpse of the quagma object whirling away from the pod and neatly returning to its orbit.

Then a shadow fell across the window.

“That’s shot us full of all sorts of funny stuff,” shouted sWyman. “Particles you wouldn’t believe, radiation at all wavelengths—”

I didn’t reply. There was a shape hovering out there, a night-dark bird with wings hundreds of miles across.

“Xeelee,” I breathed. “That’s what I saw in the ship swarm. The Xeelee are here. That’s a nightfighter—”

sWyman roared in frustration.

The Xeelee let us have it. I saw the exterior of the window glow cherry-red; gobbets melted and flew away. The Xeelee dipped his wings, once; and he flew away.

Then the window opaqued.

Something hit my head in the whirling darkness. The noise, the burning smells, sWyman’s yelled complaints — it all faded away.

“…Damn those Xeelee. I should have known they can beat anything we’ve got. And of course they would police this lithium beacon. It wouldn’t do to let us lesser types get our hands on stuff like this; oh no…”

I was drifting in a steamy darkness. There was a smell of smoke. I coughed, searched for a coffee globe. “At least the Xeelee attack stopped that damn rotation.” sWyman shut up, as if cut off. “What’s our status, sWyman?”

“Nothing that counts is working. Oh, there’s enough to let us interpret the quagma encounter… But, Luce, the inseparability packet link is smashed. We can’t talk to home.” Cradling the cooling globe I probed at my feelings. There was despair, certainly; but over it all I felt an unbearable shame.

I’d let my life be stolen. And, in the end, it was for nothing.

sWyman hissed quietly.

“How’s the life support, by the way?” I asked.

“What life support?”

I let the globe join the cabin’s floating debris and felt my way to the opaqued window. It felt brittle, half-melted. It would stay opaqued forever, I realized.

“sWyman. Tell me what happened. When that quagma droplet lunged out of its orbit and sprayed us.”

“Yeah. Well, the particles from the quagma burst left tracks like vapor trails in the matter they passed through.” I remembered how that invisible shower had prickled. The scars laced everything — the hull, the equipment, even your body. And the tracks weren’t random. There was a pattern to them. There was enough left working in here for me to decipher some of the message…”

I felt my skin crawl. “A message. You’re telling me there was information content in the scar patterns?”

“Yes,” said sWyman casually. I guess he’d had time to get used to the idea. “But what we can’t do is tell anyone about it.”

I held my breath. “Do you want to tell me?”

“Yeah…”

It was less than a second after the Big Bang.

Already there was life.

They swarmed through a quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. The oldest of them told legends of the singularity. The young scoffed, but listened in secret awe.

But the quagma was cooling. Their life-sustaining fluid was congealing into cold hadrons. Soon, the very superforce which bound their bodies would disintegrate.

They were thinking beings. Their scientists told them the end of the world, seconds away, would be followed by an eternal cold. There was nothing they could do about it.

They could not bear to be forgotten.

So they built… an ark. A melon-sized pod of quagma containing all their understanding. And they set up that unmistakable lithium-7 flare, a sign that someone had been here, at the dawn of time.

For trillions of seconds the ark waited. At last cold creatures came to see. And the ark began to tell its story.

I floated there, thinking about it. The scars lacing the pod — even my body — held as much of the understanding of the quagma creatures as they could give us. If I could have returned home engineers could have dissected the pod, doctors could have studied the tracery of tracks in my flesh; and the patterns they found could have been unscrambled.

Perhaps we would never decipher it all. Perhaps much of it would be meaningless to us. I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. For the existence of the ark was itself the quagma datum, the single key fact:

That they had been here.

And so the ark serves its purpose.

sWyman fell silent.

I drifted away from the buckled walls and began to curl up. There was a band of pain across my chest; the air must be fouling.

How long since I’d dropped out of Susy-space? Had my four days gone?

My vision started to break up. I hoped sWyman wouldn’t speak again.

Something scraped the outside of the pod.

“Luce?” sWyman whispered. “What was that?”

The scrape went the length of the pod; then came a more solid clang over the mid-section. “I’d say someone’s trying to get hold of us.”

“Who, damn it?”

I pressed my ear to a smooth patch of hull. I heard music, a bass harmonization that rumbled through the skin of the pod.

“Of course. The Ghosts. They’re right on time.”

“No.” There was a bray in his voice. “They’re too late. Our Susy-drive took the Xeelee by surprise, but if the Ghosts try to get any closer to the quagma you can bet they’ll be stopped.”

“But—” I stopped to suck oxygen out of the thick air. “The Ghosts don’t need to get any closer. The quagma data is stored in the scarred fabric of the pod itself. So if they take the pod they’ve won…”

Then, incredibly, I felt a glimmer of hope. It was like a thread of blue oxygen.

I tried to think it through. Could I actually live through this?

To Lethe’s waters with it. I’d been a passive observer through this whole thing; now, if I was going to die, at least I could choose how. I began stripping off my scorched coverall. “sWyman, listen to me. Is there a way you can destroy the pod?”

He was silent for a moment. “Why should I want to?”

“Just tell me.” I was naked. I wadded my clothes behind an equipment box.

“I could destabilize the fusion torus,” he said slowly. “Oh. I get it.”

“I presume the Ghosts have been monitoring us,” I said breathlessly. “So they’ll know that my flesh, my clothes, the fabric of the pod, contain the information they want.

“But if the pod’s destroyed… if everything except me — even my clothes — has gone… then the Ghosts will have to preserve me. Right? My body will be the only record.”

“It’s a massive gamble, Luce. You have to rely on the Ghosts knowing enough about human physiology to keep you alive… but not enough to take you apart for the quagma secrets. So they’d have to return you to Earth, to human care—”

“I don’t perceive too many alternatives.” I grabbed the frame of the pod window. “Will you do it?” More scrapes; a judder sideways.

“It means destroying myself.” He sounded scared.

I wanted to scream. “sWyman, your original is waiting for word of us, safe on Earth. If I get through this I’ll tell him what you did.”

He hesitated for five heartbeats.

Then: “Okay. Keep your mouth open when you jump. Godspeed, Michael—”

Grasping the frame with both hands I swung my feet at the window. The blistered stuff smashed easily and the fragments rushed away. Escaping air sparkled into ice. Sound sucked away and my ears popped with a wincing pain.

Snowflakes of air billowed from my open mouth, and gas tore from my bowels.

I closed my freezing eyes and felt my way around the hull. Then I kicked away as hard as I could.

I waited five seconds, then risked one last look. The Ghosts’ moon ship was a silvered landscape, tilted up to my right. A thick hose snaked up to the ripped-open pod. Chrome spheres clustered around the pod like bacteria over a wound.

I saw the flash through closed eyelids.

I tumbled backwards. The pain in my chest passed into a dull acceptance. Those Ghosts would have to move fast.

A cold smoothness closed around me.

There was light behind my eyes. I opened them to an airy room. A window to my left. Blue sky. The smell of flowers. A nurse’s concerned face over me.

A human nurse.

Behind him, a Ghost hovered.

I tried to speak. “Hello, Wyman.”

A footstep. “How did you know I was here?” His pinched expression made me smile.

“You’re looking a lot older, Wyman, you know that?” My voice was a croak. “Of course you’re here. You’ve been waiting for me to die. But here I am, ready to collect my fee.

“I expect the doctors will spend the next year scanning me on all wavelengths, mapping out the quagma scars and working out what they mean. I’ll be famous.” I laughed; my chest hurt. “But we’re going to get the treasure, Wyman. A message from another realm of creation.

“Of course we’ll have to share it. Humans and Ghosts… but at least we’ll get it.

“And you’ll have to share the profits, won’t you? And there’s my fee as well. You didn’t budget for that, did you, Wyman? I’d guess you’re about to become a lot poorer—”

He walked out, slamming the door.

“But,” I whispered, “we must put the interests of the race first.”

There was a bit of blue sky reflected in the Ghost. I stared at it and waited for sleep to return.

The burst of human inventiveness characterized by the prototype Susy drive was not sustained. As Wyman foresaw, it was simply too easy for human beings to steal what others had already discovered, rather than develop their own.

The Susy drive — unstable, expensive, unproven — was abandoned.

New images formed before my eyes.

Suddenly I was looking at my own face.

“Jack, every life has a part, in the great cosmic drama we are forced to act out. Watch, now…”

Planck Zero

Recently I’ve been poring over theoretical physics texts. My friends — those who can still stand to see me, since the Ghosts rebuilt me — can’t understand it. Okay, they say, you were almost killed by the Ghosts’ Planck Zero experiment. It was terrible. But isn’t it all over now? Why brood? Why not walk — or rather, fly — out into the sunshine, and enjoy what’s left of your life?

…But I have to do this. I need the answer to a specific question.

Is there any way out of a black hole?

When I heard of the Ghosts’ experiment I made a lot of noise. Eventually their Sink Ambassador agreed to meet me — but they insisted the venue had to be the exposed surface of the Moon. Earth conditions wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference to a Silver Ghost, of course; it was all part of the Ghosts’ endless diplomatic gavotte. As chief administrator of the Ghost liaison project, it was my precise job not to find such matters irritating.

I guess age — and Eve’s death — were making it harder for me to stomach the pettiness of interspecies diplomacy.

Into Lethe with it.

I rode out on the Sahel Cable, then took a flitter to the Moon. We were to meet outside Copernicus Dome; I suited up and walked out briskly. If the Ambassador had been hoping that my sixty-five years would keep me at home it had another thing coming.

The Silver Ghosts’ Ambassador to the Heat Sink floated a yard off the crisp Lunar regolith; the reflection of Earth was a distorted crescent sliding over its midriff.

We met without aides, as I’d requested, and spoke on a closed channel.

I came straight to the point. “Ambassador, I’ve asked to meet you because we suspect you are conducting unauthorized experiments on quagma material.”

It bobbed up and down, a child’s balloon incongruously dispatched to the airless Moon. “Jack, I would like to see evidence to support your allegation.”

I was prepared for that. “I’ll download the dossier to you. As soon as I’m satisfied you are being just as honest with me.”

“Perhaps you are speculating. Perhaps this is a—” Pause. “ — a shot in the dark? You are trying to extract valuable information from me on the threat of evidence which does not exist.”

I shook my head. “Ambassador, think it over. Your race and mine have contacts at many levels, right down to the one-man traders. Security measures between our species are as porous as human flesh.” A charming Ghost simile.

“Perhaps.” Its bobbing evolved into a complex shimmering. “Very well. Jack Raoul, we have grown to know each other, these past decades, and I am aware that you are an honest man… if not always an open one, despite your present posture as an injured party. Therefore I must accept that you have such evidence.”

I felt a surge of satisfaction. “Then you are conducting a covert project.”

“Covert, perhaps, but not intentionally so from our human partners.”

“Oh, really?…” I let it pass. “Then from whom?”

“The Xeelee.”

I studied the Ambassador with a sneaking admiration. “I’ll be impressed if you manage to keep secrets from the Xeelee. How are you doing it?”

The Ghost began to roll gently. “All in good time, Jack Raoul. We cannot be sure of secure communications, even here.”

“This conversation has served its purpose, then. Our staff can proceed with the details—”

“But we would not allow the dissemination of any data. Only an inspection tour, at the highest level, would be acceptable.”

“The highest level?”

“Perhaps you would care to visit the site yourself, Jack Raoul.”

I laughed. “Perhaps… when I find out what the catch is.”

The rolling accelerated. “We know each other too well. Jack, we would have to rebuild you.”

There was no inflection in the artificial voice. The image of Earth rippled across Ghost skin.

I shivered.

“Ambassador, just give me one hint. You know I’m an inquisitive man.”

“A hint?”

“What are you trying to do, with your quagma?”

The rolling stopped. “You have heard of the Uncertainty Principle…”

“Of course.”

“We have violated it.”

After my meeting with the Ambassador I returned to our New Bronx apartment, poured myself a malt, slumped on my favorite couch, and called up Eve.

One wall melted. Eve was heartbreakingly real, at least when she didn’t move and the image stayed stable.

She looked around quickly, as if establishing where she was, then fixed me with an admonishing stare.

“You’re looking good,” I said, raising my glass at the wall.

She snorted, but pushed a hand through her grayed hair. “What do you want, Jack? You know this is bad for you.”

“I want you to tell me about the Uncertainty Principle.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain later.”

She frowned. “The walls have plenty of popular science texts—”

“You know I can never understand a word of that stuff unless you explain it to me.”

“Lethe, Jack; that’s just sentimental—”

“Humor me. It’s important.”

She sighed and pulled at a stray lock of hair. “All right, damn it. But I’ll keep it brief; and when it’s over, that’s it.”

“It’s a deal.”

Now Eve changed, subtly, so that — without any obvious reworking of the image — she seemed younger, more comfortable on the couch. I guessed the wall was accessing an older part of her Notebooks. “To understand Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle,” she began, “you need to get a handle on quantum mechanics.”

According to the quantum philosophy, particles like electrons don’t exist as points of mass and charge. Instead each electron has a wave function which describes its position, velocity and other properties; it’s as if the electron is spread over a small volume of space delimited by the wave function.

“So where does the Uncertainty Principle come in?”

Eve twisted my ring around her finger. “You can reduce the spread of an electron’s position wave-volume — perhaps by inspecting it using very high frequency photons. But the catch is that the wave-volume associated with another variable — the electron’s momentum — expands enormously. And vice versa.

“So you can never know both the electron’s position and momentum; you can never reduce both wave-volumes to zero.”

“Okay. What’s the size of these volumes?”

“The scale is given by Planck’s constant. Which is a small number; one of the fundamental constants of physics. But in real terms — suppose you measured an electron’s position to within a billionth of an inch. Then the momentum uncertainty would be such that a second later you couldn’t be sure where the damn thing was to within a hundred miles.”

I nodded. “Then the principle is describing a fundamental fuzziness in reality—”

She waved her hand with exasperation. “Don’t talk like a cheap data desk, Jack. There’s nothing fuzzy about reality. The wave functions are the fundamental building blocks of the Universe; their governing wave equations are completely deterministic… well, never mind. The Uncertainty Principle is essentially an expression of the scale of those wave functions.”

“How does this relate to your work?”

She sighed and sat back in her couch. “It was at the heart of it, Jack.”

Eve had spent much of her working life trying to develop the principles of remote translation systems. Teleport beams, to you and me.

She said, “A translation device might work by scanning the position of every particle in an object. That information could be transferred somewhere else and a copy constructed of the original, exact down to the last electron.”

“But the Uncertainty Principle tells us that’s impossible.”

“Correct. But the Principle says nothing about transferring exact data about the wave functions themselves… and that was the approach I was working on. Also, in some way we still don’t fully understand, the quantum waves provide a connectivity to space. When two objects are once joined there is a sense in which they are forever linked, by quantum properties. It may be that unless full quantum functions are copied, remote translation is impossible.”

“That which God has joined, let no man put asunder.”

She looked at me suspiciously, as if expecting me to burst into tears. “Something like that. Jack, it may also be that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. Without our defining quantum functions — without the anchorage they give us to reality, and to those around us — we are nothing.”

I set down my glass, stood and walked to the wall. Hesitantly she got up and walked closer to her side. “And this wave-function mapping was the technical barrier you could never breach.”

She shrugged. “Perhaps it’s just as well. Because if this was a perfect image of me, Jack, stored in this wall, you’d never leave this damn apartment.” She looked up at me, and I imagined her eyes softening. “Would you?”

“What would happen if you violated the Uncertainty Principle?”

The image wavered slightly; I imagined the wall frantically searching its datastores for a response. “You can’t. Jack, haven’t you understood a word I’ve said?”

“Just suppose.”

She frowned. “If the uncertainty limit were lowered somehow then greater data compression would be possible. Better data storage.”

“So sharper wall images. What else?”

“Faster, more compact computing devices.” The image crumbled for a sudden, shocking moment into a storm of cubical pixels. “Jack, this is right at the edge of what I left in my Notebooks.”

“Bear with me, please… it is important. How would you do it?”

She rubbed the bridge of her nose, as if her head was aching. “Assuming you’re talking about the Universe we’re living in — so the fundamental laws are the same — you’d have to find a way of reducing Planck’s constant, over some region of space. The interface between Planck-differentiated regions would be kind of interesting. But it’s impossible, of course.” She looked up at me, troubled. “Jack, I don’t like this. It makes me feel — odd.”

“I’m sorry.” Without thinking I reached for her, through the wall; but my hand passed through her arm with little resistance.

“Jack. Don’t.” She stepped back, out of my reach. “It only hurts you.”

“I have to go away.”

“What?”

“I’m to make an inspection of a Ghost experiment. They say I must be physically modified… I might not come back.”

“Well, why not,” she said. “Lethe, Jack, I’ve been dead three years. You’re getting morbid.” Then she raised both hands to her head and said indistinctly, “If Planck’s constant were taken to the ultimate, down to zero—”

“What? Eve, tell me.”

She looked at me through a hail of pixels, her eyes wide. “Space could shatter—”

She dissolved. The wall became a wall again.

So I was made a Ghost.

My brain and spinal cord were rolled up and moved into a cleaned-out chest cavity. My circulatory system was wrapped into a complex mass around the brain pan. The Ghosts built a new metabolic system, far more efficient than the old and capable of working off direct radiative input. New eyes, capable of working in spectral regions well beyond the human range, were bolted into my skull; and I was given Ghost “muscles” — a tiny antigravity drive and compact actuator motors.

At last I was dipped in something like hot mercury.

The Sink Ambassador came to see me while I was being reconstructed. Its voice was like a bird hovering in the darkness. “How do you feel?”

I laughed — or sent appropriate impulses to my translator chips, at least. “How do you think I feel?”

“They tell me your spirits are high…”

“You’re reducing Planck’s constant. Aren’t you? But I don’t understand what quagma has to do with it.”

The Ghost hesitated.

When its voice came through again it had a richer timbre. “I have established a closed channel. All right, Jack. You are aware that quagma is the state of matter which emerged from the Big Bang. Matter, when raised to sufficiently high temperatures, melts into a magma of quarks — a quagma. And at such temperatures the fundamental forces of physics unify into a single superforce. Quagma is bound together only by such a superforce. When quagma is allowed to cool and expand the superforce decomposes into the four sub-forces.”

“So?”

“By controlling the decomposition, one can select the ratio between those forces.”

“Ah.” Eve, I wish you were here to help me with this… “And those ratios govern the fundamental constants — including Planck’s constant.”

“Correct.”

I wanted to rub my face, but my head and hands had been taken away. “So you’re building a model Universe, in which Planck’s constant is lowered. Lethe, Ambassador. I’m surprised the Xeelee have let you get as far as you have.”

“We have concealed well… Jack Raoul, are you still human?”

I would have shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t sound as if you care.”

“Why should you?”

“I have known you for a long time, Jack. Among my people there are analogies for the grief you felt at the loss of your wife.”

“Ambassador, do you think this is some complicated way of committing suicide? You invited me to take the damn trip, remember.”

“Human or not, you will still have friends.”

“You can’t imagine how much that comforts me.”

They disconnected my new senses during the hyperspace flight. “I apologize,” the Sink Ambassador said. “When we reach the quagma project site you will have freedom to inspect.”

“But you don’t trust me with the location.”

“I do not have a free rein, my friend.”

I spent the passage floating in a Virtual reality, trying not to think about what lay beyond my skin.

I emerged into a half-Universe.

I was in a Ghost intrasystem cruiser, a rough ovoid constructed of silvered rope. Instrument clusters were knotted to the walls. Perhaps a dozen Ghosts clung to the rope like berries on seaweed.

Above me I saw stars. Below me a floor of crimson mist, a featureless plane, extended to infinity.

A Ghost approached me.

“Ambassador?”

“We have arrived, Jack Raoul.”

“Arrived where?” I gestured at the blood-red floor. “What’s this?”

The Ambassador rolled, as if amused. “Jack, this is a red giant star. Are you familiar with astrophysics? This star is about as wide as Earth’s orbit. We have emerged a million miles above its boundary.”

I’m no small-town boy; I’d been off Earth before. But this was different. I felt the soft human thing inside my Ghost shell cringe.

I’d seen nothing yet.

The ship plunged into the interior of the star.

I cried out and grabbed at silvered rope. Glowing banks of mist shot upwards all around us. The Ghost crew floated about their tasks, unconcerned.

“Lethe, Ambassador.”

“I could not warn you.”

We emerged into a clear layer within the star. Far, far below was a dense ocean of fire, looking like some fantastic sodium-lit cityscape; beneath it something small, hot and yellow glowed brightly. We descended through slices of fire-cloud with startling speed.

The Ambassador said, “You are perhaps aware that this giant is a star in the latter part of its life. Its bulk is a gas whose density is only a thousandth that of Earth’s atmosphere, and whose temperature is well below that at the surface of Sol. Easily managed by your new skin. So you see, there is nothing to fear.”

Now the ship veered to the right, and we skirted a huge, blackened thunderhead. “A convection fount; complex products from the core,” explained the Ghost.

“The core?”

“Like a white dwarf star, about the size and mass of Sol. It is mostly helium by now, but hydrogen fusion is still proceeding in a surface layer.” The Ghost rolled complacently. “Jack, your visit — this project — is inspired by quantum mechanics. Do you understand the Pauli Exclusion Principle? — that no two quantum objects can share the same state? You may be amused to know that it is electron degeneracy pressure — a form of the Pauli Principle — which keeps that core from collapsing on itself.”

“You’re prepared to live inside a star, just to evade detection by the Xeelee?”

“We anticipate long-term benefits.”

We dropped into another clear stratus. The core was a ball about as hot and bright as the Sun from Earth; it rolled beneath us. Starstuff drifted above us like smog.

The Ghosts had built a city here.

Once this must have been a moon. It was a hollowed-out ball of rock, a thousand miles wide. Ghost ships swept over the pocked landscape.

At the poles two vast cylindrical structures gleamed. These were intrasystem drives, the Ambassador explained, there to maintain the moon’s orbit about the core.

Our ship approached the city-world’s surface — there was negligible gravity, so that it was like hovering before some vast, slotted wall — and, at length, slid into an aperture.

I turned to the Ambassador. “I won’t pretend I’m not impressed.”

“Naturally, after this demonstration, I will provide you with any backup data you require for your report.”

“Demonstration? Of what?”

A hint of pride shone through the thin, sexless tones of the translator chips. “We have timed your arrival to coincide with the initiation of a new phase of our project.”

“I’m honored.”

We hurtled along dimly-lit passages. Other craft dipped and soared all around us. Blocks of light tumbled from cross-corridors, reminding me irresistibly of pixels. I recalled Eve’s strange, ambiguous warning, and wondered bleakly if I really wanted to be present at the dawn of a “new phase.”

With a soundless rush we emerged into a spherical cavity miles wide. Beams of crimson starlight crossed the hollow, bathing its walls with a blood-red glow. At the heart of the chamber was a sphere. A couple of miles across, the sphere gleamed golden and was semi-transparent, like a half-silvered mirror. Platforms bearing Ghost workers hovered over its surface.

Some vast machine moved softly, within the confines of the mirrored sphere.

“Mr. Raoul, welcome to our experiment,” the Sink Ambassador said.

“What is that sphere?”

“Nothing material. The sphere is the boundary between our Universe… and another domain, which we have constructed by letting quagma droplets inflate under controlled conditions. Within this domain the ratio you know as Planck’s constant is reduced, to about ten percent of its value elsewhere. Other physical constants are identical.”

“Why the half-silvered effect?”

“The energy carried by a photon is proportional to the Planck number. When a photon enters the Planck domain the energy it may carry is reduced. Do you understand? It therefore sheds energy at the boundary, in the form of a second photon, emitted back into normal space.”

I asked if we were to enter the Planck space.

“I fear not,” the Ambassador said. “Our fundamental structure is based on Planck’s constant: the spacing of electrons around the nucleus of an atom, for example. If you were to enter the domain, you would be — adjusted. The device in there — an artificial mind — has been constructed to withstand such Planck changes. The device controls the regeneration of the domain from quagma; we are also using it to conduct computational experiments.”

The machine in its golden sac turned, brooding, like some vast animal.

“Ambassador, what is your purpose?”

The Ghosts, the Ambassador said, had two objectives. The first was to use the Planck boundary conditions to build a perfect reflective surface, an age-old goal of the energy-hoarding Ghosts.

The second objective was more interesting.

“The capacity of any computing machine is limited by the Uncertainty Principle,” the Ambassador said. “The exploration of, say, high-value prime numbers has always been constrained by the fact that energy changes within a device must remain above the uncertainty level.

“With the reduction in Planck’s constant we can go further. Much further. For example, we have already managed to find a disproof of an ancient human hypothesis known as Goldbach’s conjecture.”

Goldbach, it seems, speculated that any even number can be expressed as the sum of two primes. Twelve equals five plus seven; forty equals seventeen plus twenty-three. Centuries of endeavor had neither proved nor disproved the hypothesis.

The Planck machine had found a counterexample, a number in the region of ten raised to the power eighty.

“I guess I’m impressed,” I said.

The Ghost rolled gently. “My friend, age-old problems melt before our Planck machine; already several NP-type problems have—”

I told the Ambassador I believed it, and to dump down the details later.

The science platforms were pulling away now, leaving the gold-silver sphere exposed and alone.

The Sink Ambassador continued its lecture. “But we want to go further. We see this Planck-adjustment technique as a means of probing — not just the very large — but the infinite. Our device will verify some of the most important theorems of our, and your, mathematics, simply by a direct inspection of cases, all the way to infinity.”

I stared at the bobbing Ghost. “I think you’re losing me. Won’t an infinite number of cases still take an infinite amount of time? — and energy?”

“Not if the time and energy is allocated in decreasing amounts, so that the total converges to some finite value. And — if the Uncertainty Principle is removed completely — there is no limit to the smallness of energy allocations.”

“Right. So you’re going to take Planck’s constant all the way to zero.”

“That’s right. And, Jack, mathematical conjectures are just the start. A training exercise. The artificial mind is heuristic — it is flexible; it can learn. With its infinite capacity at our disposal we anticipate the dawn of a new era of—”

There was a spark, dazzling bright, at the heart of the silvered Planck sac. The mind-device thrashed like some grotesque fetus.

I knotted my fingers in a length of silvered rope. “Ambassador, ‘space could shatter.’ ”

“What?”

“What does that mean to you?”

“…Nothing. Jack, are you—”

The flame filled the sac, overwhelming the machine. For an instant the sac glowed brighter than the star core.

Then the sac turned silver. It looked like some huge Ghost. Images of the crowding science platforms, of the slotted walls of the city-world cavity, shivered over its flanks.

“Ambassador, what’s happening?”

“…I’m not certain.”

“Have you achieved Planck Zero?”

“Yes. But the device should be signaling to us—”

The walls of the sac contracted by a few hundred feet, trembling; it was as if the sac were a living creature, breathing in.

My ship lurched away from the sac and towards the walls of the chamber. One crewman was left tumbling in space, like a drop of mercury in freefall. I clung grimly to my rope.

The walls were still miles away.

The sac’s surface billowed out and overwhelmed us.

I was utterly alone.

Lonely.

Darkness.

…Dark because photons could carry no energy, here at Planck Zero; nothing to excite my optic sensors…

Cold. How could I be cold? I rubbed my hands together. I could feel my fingers break up like ancient, crumbled paper.

Electron orbits in an atom are proportional to Planck’s constant. At Planck Zero the orbits must collapse… right? So, no more chemistry. How long before the crumbling process reached my brain pan?

How would it feel?

And quantum wave functions, linking me to the rest of the Universe, had all turned to dust at Planck Zero.

I could feel it. I was alone in this shattered space.

What about the ship? Was it still heading for the wall?… Something else, in here with me. The Ghosts? No; something larger, more powerful.

Infinite.

The mind-device was without limit. It was stranded in this discontinuous space, and it was enraged.

Enraged by a pain I recognized.

Now I made out other minds. Ghosts. They were like tiny stars, shining out, falling away from each other.

The Planck mind lashed out. Ghosts were overwhelmed, insects in fire.

…The ship burst out of the sac; quantum functions rushed over me (for a precious moment visible, like prismatic waves lapping around me) and I was bound into the Universe once more.

The ship hurtled through a city-world passage, trailing ragged fragments. Ghosts lay dying all around me, their proud bodies deflated.

I looked back down the passage. A silver half-dome peered after us like some vast eye.

“…Sink Ambassador?”

“I’m still here, Jack.”

We emerged from the city-world. Ghost paramedics floated onto our ship and tended the wounded.

The city-world was changing.

A light, clear and white, shone out of the hundreds of portals, illuminating the murky giant star material. The massive drive assemblies at the poles had been damaged; I saw sparks fizzing across the surface of the nearer. A flotilla of heavy Ghost ships approached the drive units.

“Ambassador, what are they doing?”

“We must endeavor to repair the drive units, or the moon will fall into the core… Jack, the growth of the Planck sac in that cavity was not controlled. We are afraid.”

“I bet you are.”

“We are going to try to move the moon out of the giant star.”

“And then what?”

“We must find some way to restrain the sac.”

I stared down at the core of the giant. “Ambassador, it will overwhelm you. What are the limits to its growth?”

“There are no limits. Perhaps the Xeelee will intervene.”

“The Xeelee aren’t gods.” I thought fast. “Sink Ambassador, listen to me. Do you have any influence over operations here?”

“Why?”

“Stop the efforts to repair the drives.”

“…I do not have the authority.”

“Then find someone who does. As acting human ambassador here, I formally request this. Sink Ambassador, have you recorded that?”

“Yes, Jack. Why do you want this?”

“Because I’m frightened, too. But I think there is a way out.”

The Ghosts cut the drive assemblies loose from the city-world. Within an hour the Planck sac had overwhelmed the battered moon; it hung in the giant star glow, perfectly silver. They got us out of there. I could see reflections in the sac’s surface, chains of ropy Ghost ships heading for safety. It took about a day for the Planck sac to impact the star core. By that time it was ten thousand miles wide and still growing. Huge ripples crossed its monstrous surface. It slid inside the star core, fusing hydrogen closing smoothly over the shining ovoid, vacuoles flaring.

An hour later the core started to implode.

Disembodied, the Sink Ambassador and I floated over Virtual images of the collapsing core. I said, “I wish Eve could see this.”

“Yes.”

By now, of course, the Ghosts had figured it out for themselves; but I couldn’t resist rubbing it in. “It was your chance comment about electron degeneracy pressure that gave me the key. Suppose Planck were reduced to zero in the star core. The higher quantum states would collapse — spin values, for instance, would fall from Planck multiples to zero.”

The Pauli Exclusion Principle could not work, and electron degeneracy pressure would fail. The star core must implode… all the way, past the neutron star compaction limit, on to become a black hole.

“Actually,” the Ambassador said smoothly, “there are technicalities you didn’t consider. For example, no electron can have zero spin value. Nor can any fermion. Presumably the core fermions are collapsing to bosons, like photons… The physics must be interesting in there.”

“Whatever. It worked, didn’t it?”

“Yes. We have contained the Planck Zero sac expansion. Within an event horizon, for all time.”

“And we’ve locked away your Planck Zero AI.”

The Ghost thought that over. “That is important to you?”

“What did you sense, inside the sac?”

“Infinite power… and anger.”

“There was more, Ambassador. In discontinuous space, without the anchorage of quantum wave functions, it was utterly alone. And lonely. And it was furious. Do you see?”

Quantum loneliness.

I had recognized a fellow sufferer. In my loneliness I can only hurt myself, but the mind-device had an infinite capacity for destruction. Still, it was trapped now…

Then I began to wonder, and I haven’t been able to stop. Is there any way out of a black hole?

The images conjured up by Eve had been like reflections in the glimmering walls of the Planck sac.

I brooded, for a while unable to speak.

Eve asked, “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know.”

I’d relived it all again. The rebuilding. The horror of that quantum loneliness.

“Nobody should have to go through that twice,” I said angrily.

“I know, Jack. And I’m sorry. But it’s important that—”

“ — I understand. I know. What next, Eve?”

“Next,” she said, “we’ll look ahead…”

“Ahead? Into the future? How is that possible?”

“Watch,” she said. “Just watch.”

…Five thousand years in the future, and ten thousand years after its first eruption from Earth, humanity’s colonization wavefront spread at lightspeed through the Galaxy.

Its experiences, at the hands of the Qax and others, had changed humanity.

Never again would humanity be made to serve at the behest of some alien power.

As humans grew in power, the conquest of other species became an industry. A new era began.