“We’re used to quagmites, I suppose,” Pirius said. “We design around them.”
“But look,” Nilis said, and he traced the lines with his fingers. “Look here, and here… Can’t you see, even in this simple summary image? These lines weren’t inflicted at random. There are patterns here, Pilot! And where there are patterns there is information.
“Every aspect of the lines seems to contain data: their positions in three dimensions, the timing with which they were inflicted, the nature of the projectiles which caused them. There’s really a remarkable amount of information, here in these scars — a whole library full, I suspect. Not that I have come anywhere near extracting more than a fraction of it yet. It seems a coarse way to leave a message, like signing one’s name with bullets sprayed at a wall. But you can’t deny it’s effective!
“You must see the significance of this discovery. The quagmites were attracted to your GUTdrive energy, yes; they appear to feed off it. But they weren’t attacking you. They were trying to communicate with you. And in those two facts, I believe, lies the answer to the mystery of the quagmites’ nature.
“The quagmites are alive, Pirius. They are creatures of this universe, just as we are. But the stuff of which they are made isn’t so common now. Do you see? Once again we have to confront universal history. For the quagmites — like the Xeelee! — are survivors of a much earlier age…”
He spoke of those moments before nucleosynthesis, just a microsecond or so after the singularity, when the universe was a soup of quarks, a quagma. The quagmites had swarmed through a quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. But the quagma cooled. Their life-sustaining fluid congealed into cold protons and neutrons, and then further into atomic nuclei. They were thinking beings, but there was nothing they could do about the end of their world.
“They found a way to survive the great cosmic transition, the congealing of their life stuff.” His rheumy eyes were vague, as he considered prospects invisible to Pirius. “I wonder what they see, when they look at us. To them we are cold, dead things, made of dead stuff. All they see is the occasional bright spark of our GUTdrives. And when they do, they come to feed, and to talk to us.”
“Not to us,” Pirius said. “To our ships.”
“Ha!” Nilis slapped his thigh. “Of course, of course. I have to say this is not entirely an original insight. Quagmites have been studied before. The lessons are still there, I found, but buried deep in our Archives. Sometimes I wonder how much we have forgotten, how little we retain — and the older our culture grows the more wisdom we lose. What a desolating thought!”
Pirius tried to bring him back to the point. “Commissary, I don’t see what this has to do with the Project.”
“Well, nor do I,” Nilis said cheerfully. “Which is why we have to find out! You see, I deduced from the captured nightfighter that the Xeelee too are relics of an earlier cosmic epoch, earlier even than the quagmites. Surely it isn’t a coincidence that we find them both swarming around Chandra!” Nilis rubbed his face, smoothing out his jowly flesh. “Clearly there is a pattern, which we must understand. That is why I have been seeking ways to study the early universe, like this neutrino telescope. And I must continue to study, to gather data, to learn… But if any of this is correct, there is the question of why.”
“Why what?”
Nilis waved a hand vaguely. “Why should the universe be so fecund? Why should it be that at every stage it is filled with life, with burgeoning complexity? It surely didn’t have to be so.” He leaned closer and spoke conspiratorially. “The ancients did a lot of thinking about this, you know. You can imagine a universe that would not support life, at any stage. Of course in that case nobody would be around to observe it. There were some philosophers who speculated that our universes fecundity is no accident. Perhaps it was designed in, somehow, or at least nurtured. Perhaps the universe itself is an immense artifact, a technological womb of spacetime! But these ideas were suppressed, like so much else, when the Coalition’s grip tightened. For a mankind traumatized by near-extinction at the hands of the Qax, the idea that such powers might exist was simply too challenging. So the ancient work was buried — but not destroyed.”
Pirius knew by now that Nilis had a habit of letting his research run away, far beyond any practical use. “But what do we do?”
Nilis grimaced. “All this is very indirect, based on long chains of deductions. We need to get closer to the target. I would like, somehow, to make some direct observations of Chandra itself. But I fear that to do that I must return to the center of the Galaxy — or at least a part of me.”
Pirius didn’t know what he meant. “But, Commissary — what am I doing here?”
“The staff here will continue to work on my quagmite analysis. I want you to work with them. You have been trained in the behavior and properties of the quagmites. These habitat-dwellers are all a bit theoretical; perhaps you will give their thinking some meat! And,” he said more hesitantly, “I thought you might appreciate a little quiet time to reflect.”
Pirius nodded. “Oh. So this is a punishment for Pluto.”
“Not a punishment, not at all. I just want you to, umm, work your way through the issues that caused your breakdown.”
“Breakdown?” Pirius was indignant. “What are you, a psych officer?… Sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Nilis said evenly. “What do you think was going through your head, out there on the ice?”
Pirius tried to find the words. “It was just — out in a place like Arches, you grow up in a Rock. It’s your whole world. You train, you fight, you die. And that’s it. It’s the same for everybody. It doesn’t even occur to you that other things are possible. You never question why your life is the way it is. The Doctrines are just in the background, as unquestioned as, as…”
“As the Rock under your feet.”
“Yes.”
“And then you come to Earth,” Nilis said gently.
“And then you come to Earth. And suddenly you question everything.”
“The trouble is not the state of the Galaxy, you know, not even Earth.”
“Then what?”
“The trouble is you, Pirius. You’re growing, and it isn’t comfortable. All your life you have been conditioned, by agencies with an expertise millennia old. Since I plucked you out of Arches, you have been confronted by experiences which contradicted that conditioning. Now, because you’re no fool, you’re going one step further. You’re starting to understand that you have been conditioned. Isn’t that true?”
“I suppose so,” Pirius said miserably.
“And you will discover the real Pirius — if there’s anything of him inside that conditioned shell.”
“And then what?”
“And then,” Nilis said, “you’re going to have to decide what it is you want to fight for. Of course this is my fault. I never anticipated how hard this would be for you, and Torec. But we are so different, Pirius! I live on Earth — which is after all where humans evolved. Whereas you grew up in a sort of bottle. I respond to the rhythms of the turning Earth, you to a clock. To me the day starts with dawn; to you it is reveille. There are birds in my world, birds and flowers, nothing but rats in yours. Even our language is different: I have my feet on the ground, but my ideas are sometimes blue-sky — but such metaphors mean nothing to you! And you don’t have a lover, you have a squeeze… I never foresaw how unhappy it would make you.”