“It was a very long-term proposition, one of humanity’s first mega-projects. But the cost was modest; you only had to pay for the first generation of engineered bugs. The project has now been going on for twenty thousand years — at least that long; it was founded by the ancients, it’s believed, in the days even before the Qax Occupation.”
Once Venus’s carbon had been locked up in the convenient form of the chalk, it was easily mined, and had a myriad possible uses. But, said Nilis, it was only after the first few thousand years of the project that an unexpectedly useful application of Venus’s new crust of carbon dioxide polymers was discovered. “It turned out that some of the structures formed, in the hot, compressed layers of Venus chalk, had very interesting properties indeed.”
Pirius took a guess. “You’re talking about neutrinos.”
“Yes.”
Neutrinos were exotic subatomic particles. Like ghosts, they passed through matter, through Pirius’s own body, or even the bulk of a world like Venus, barely noticing that anything was in the way. “And that makes them rather hard to observe,” said Nilis.
Which was where Venus’s chalk came in. It was found that some of the more exotic polymers formed at high temperature and pressure in Venus’s gathering chalk layers were good at trapping neutrinos — or rather, traces of their passage.
Neutrinos took part in nuclear reactions: when atomic nuclei fissioned or fused, releasing floods of energy in the process. Nilis said, “There are two places in nature where such reactions are commonplace. One was in the first few minutes of the formation of the universe itself — the moments of nucleosynthesis, when primordial baryonic particles, protons and neutrons, combined to form the first complex nuclei. The other is in the center of the stars, which run on fusion power. So, you see, a neutrino telescope can see into the fusing heart of the sun.”
So Venus was given a new role: as a watchtower.
“The ancients believed a deep monitoring of the sun was important — but not for the sun itself. Stars are pretty simple machines, really, much simpler than bacteria, say, and were thoroughly understood long before the first extrasolar planet was visited. No, it wasn’t the sun they were interested in but what lay within the sun. Dark matter,” Nilis said. “That’s what Michael Poole’s generation were watching. Dark matter, in the center of the sun…”
As the sun swept through its orbit around the center of the Galaxy, it encountered dark matter. Almost as ghostlike as neutrinos, much of it simply passed through the sun’s bulk. But some interacted with the dense, hot stuff at the center of the sun, and losing energy, was trapped. Nilis said, “It orbits, lumps of dark matter orbiting the sun, even within the fusing heart of the star. Remarkable when you think about it.”
It was this strange inner solar system of dark matter, entirely contained within the bulk of the sun, that the Venus facility had been designed to study. The dark-matter particles would annihilate each other, and in doing so released more neutrinos, to be trapped at Venus and analyzed.
“I’ve glanced at the data streams,” Nilis said. “You can see structure in there: clumps, aggregates — even what looks like purposeful motion. There are some who speculate there is life in there, life- forms of dark matter. Why not, I say?”
Pirius was baffled. “What harm can a trace of dark matter do?”
“I don’t know,” said Nilis honestly. “The ancients obviously feared it, though. I’ve seen hints in the Archive of much more ambitious projects than this: engineered humans injected into the dark matter streams in the heart of the sun, and so on.”
And Luru Parz, Pirius thought, who might herself be a survivor of those ancient times, still watched dark matter at the other extreme of Sol system. Here was another deep secret, another ancient fear.
“Commissary, you aren’t interested in what’s going on in the sun.”
“No. But I am interested in primordial nucleosynthesis.” That was the other source of neutrinos. He was talking about the Big Bang.
As the universe expanded from its initial singularity, Nilis said, physics evolved rapidly. In the first microsecond, space was filled with quagma, a swarming magma of quarks, as if the whole universe was a single huge proton. But the universe expanded and cooled, and by the end of the first second most of the quarks had been locked up into baryonic particles, protons and neutrons. For the next few minutes, the universe was a ferocious cauldron of nuclear reactions, as evanescent atomic nuclei formed, almost immediately breaking up again, unstable in the ferocious heat. Neutrinos took part in this shatteringly rapid dance.
But then, as the temperature dropped further, simple nuclei like helium suddenly became stable. The universe froze out. Just three minutes after the singularity this flurry of nucleosynthesis was over, and expanding space was filled with hydrogen and helium. There would be no more baking of nuclei until much later in the life of the universe, when the first stars formed.
“And with no more nucleosynthesis,” said Nilis, “the primordial neutrinos no longer interacted with matter. To them the universe, at three minutes old, was already just about transparent. Those ancient neutrinos still drench space even today. Now, Venus was designed to watch neutrinos from the sun—”
“But a neutrino is a neutrino,” Pirius said.
“Yes. And in those primordial neutrinos can be read a story of the earliest moments of the universe. And it is a story of life, Ensign.”
“Life?”
“Quagmites.”
It had actually been the analysis of the damage suffered by Pirius Blue’s greenship, the Assimilator’s Claw, that had prompted Nilis to come here to Venus, to start thinking about neutrinos.
“It was I who ordered that your ship be subject to a proper forensic examination,” he said. “After all, it had been in close proximity to the Xeelee — not to mention a magnetar! I believed your ship might carry traces of its adventures from which we might learn more. And so I wanted it to be given more than a cursory glance in an Engineering Guild repair shop.”
What Nilis’s scientists had discovered had not, in the event, been about the Xeelee at all, or even the magnetar. It was quagmites.
Nilis said, “Have you really never wondered what quagmites actually are? And how they come to be so attracted to GUT energies?”
“No,” Pirius said honestly. To pilots, quagmites were just an odd kind of virus which gave you trouble if you used a GUTdrive anywhere in the Central Star Mass. Since GUTdrives were essentially an obsolete technology, carried as backup in case more effective sublight-drive systems failed, nobody ever gave quagmites much thought.
“Yes, yes, I understand your point of view,” Nilis said. “You aren’t even interested in the fact that these things are so obviously alive, are you?”
Pirius shrugged. Life in itself wasn’t very interesting; as mankind had moved across the face of the Galaxy, life had been discovered everywhere.
“Pirius, when its GUTdrive lit up, the Claw was peppered by small, but dense projectiles.” He clapped his hands and produced a Virtual image of the greenship. A translucent cutaway, it was laced through by a complex tracery of shining straight lines. “You were shot up, as if you had flown through a hail of bullets. The particles were bits of quagma, and they left tracks like vapor trails in the matter they passed through. The scars cut through everything — the hull, the equipment, even the bodies of you and your crew. But those greenships are tough little vessels; your systems took a lot of damage, but there was enough redundancy to see you through.”