It was Nilis’s moment of triumph. When Enduring Hope looked for the Commissary, he was nowhere to be seen.
Luru Parz watched, her eyes cold.
“Lethe, Nilis was right,” Marshal Kimmer said. “It worked! Where is that oaf? Commissary!”
At last Nilis came running onto the walkway. He was carrying a data desk which he waved in the air. He hurried up to Kimmer. “Marshal! I have it at last. Those final images of the web structure were the key — I knew there was more to this black hole than we suspected!”
Kimmer evidently didn’t know what he was talking about, and didn’t care. He wrapped one arm around Nilis’s shoulders. “Commissary, you old fool! Unlike you, I have no imagination. I had to see it with my own eyes to believe it. But you’ve done it! You’ve ripped a hole in that peculiar Xeelee nest — and we still have four armed ships left to finish the job. By the time we’re done that black hole will be as naked as the day it was formed, and the Xeelee will have nowhere to hide. I tell you, if you told me you had found a way to beat the Xeelee in a bare-knuckle fight I’d believe you now!”
Nilis pulled away forcibly. When he spoke, it was practically a shriek. “Marshal — listen to me. We have to call off the attack?
Kimmer, shocked, was silenced.
Luru Parz said, “And the remaining ships—”
“Call them home. Let no more lives be lost today.”
Kimmer looked thunderous. “You had better explain yourself, Commissary.”
Nilis waved his data desk. “I told you. I have it!”
“You have what?”
“The truth about Chandra. The Xeelee live off the black hole. But the Xeelee aren’t alone…”
Chapter 57
The monads cared nothing for humans, of course, or for quagmites, or Xeelee, or photino birds, or any of the rest of the universe’s menagerie at this or any other age. But they liked their universes to have story; and it was living things that generated the most interesting sagas.
And so in the time before time, when they picked out their seedling universes from the reef of possibilities, the monads, midwives of reality, exerted a subtle selection pressure. They chose for enrichment only the brightest bubbles in the cosmic spindrift: bubbles with a special, precious quality. A tendency to complexify.
Thoughtful beings, human and otherwise, would wonder at the endless fecundity of their universe, a universe that spawned life at every stage of its existence — and wonder why it had to be so.
Some of them came to understand that it was the universe’s own innate tendency to complexify that had created the richness of structure within it.
Simple laws of molecular combination governed the growth of such intricate, inanimate forms as snowflakes and DNA molecules. But autocatalysis and homeostasis enabled simple structures to interact and spin off more complex structures still, until living things emerged, which combined into ever more complicated entities.
The same pattern showed in other aspects of reality. The hive structures of ant colonies and Coalescent communities emerged without conscious design from the small decisions of their drones. Even in the world of human ideas, the structures of religions, economies, and empires fed back on themselves and became ever richer. Even mathematical toys, like games of artificial life run in computer memories, seemed to demonstrate an unwavering tendency to grow more complicated. But then, human mathematics was a mirror of the universe humans found themselves in; that was why mathematics worked.
Complexifying seemed inevitable. But it was not. A universe could be imagined without this tendency.
If the ability to complexify had suddenly been turned off, the universe would have seemed very different. Snowflakes would not form, birds would not flock, ants and Coalescents would have tumbled out of their disintegrating hives, baffled. On larger scales, economic and historical cycles would break up. Ecosystems would fail; there would be no coral reefs, no forests. The great cycles of matter and energy, mediated by life, on a living world like Earth would collapse.
But of course there would be no observers of such catastrophes, for without complexity’s search for feedback loops and stable processes, hearts could not beat, and embryos could not form.
Humans had the good fortune to exist in a universe in which there was no law of conservation of complexity, no limit to its supply.
But it didn’t have to be that way. That the universe could complexify, that richness of existence was possible at all, was thanks to the monads, and their subtle pan-cosmic selection. The monads had selected, designed, nurtured a universe that would be fruitful forever, in which there was no limit to the possibilities for life and energy, for life and mind, as far ahead as it was possible to look.
While empires rose and fell, while the universe continued its endless unraveling of possibility after possibility, the monads slumbered. They had done their work, made their contribution. Now they waited for the precious moments of the furthest future when this universe, in turn grown old, spawned new fragments of chaos, and they could wake again.
But in their epochal sleep, even the monads could be drawn into history. And even they could be harmed.
Chapter 58
Luru Parz watched the Commissary with blank hostility, Enduring Hope with bafflement.
Nilis tried to tell his complex story too quickly, too briefly. For months he had been trying to assemble all the data on Chandra that he could find: on the Xeelee and quagmites and other denizens, on cosmological data like the relic Big Bang radiation, on the astrophysics of the black hole itself and the knotted-up singularity at its heart — and now even on the extraordinary artifact the Xeelee had wrapped around the event horizon. And he had come to a new conclusion.
Nilis said triumphantly, “Do you see? Do you see now?”
“No,” snapped Kimmer.
There was a story in this information, said Nilis. And that story was the secret history of the universe.
Nilis said he had looked deep into the structure of Chandra, and had found life infesting even the singularity at its heart. “These deep ones — the ones I call monads; it is a very antique word — they are older than all of us. Older than the Xeelee, older than the universe itself! It will take a lot of study to figure it all out. But it’s clear that the monads are responsible for life in this universe. Or rather for the tendency of this universe to complexify, to produce life. It is a level of deep design about the universe nobody ever suspected. And in their nests of folded spacetime, huddled inside the event horizons of black holes, they slumber — waiting for our petty ages to pass away — until the time comes for a new universe to be born from the wreckage of the old.”
“And the Xeelee—”
“They live off Chandra, the black hole. Their net structure is the great machine which allows them to achieve their goals: to birth nightfighters, to use the black hole as a computing engine, all of it. But that’s trivial. It’s what’s inside the black hole that counts. The Xeelee are just parasites. Secondary. They don’t matter!”