The fundamental division of the world was seen as essentially tragic, and inspired many stories.
The various matter species, meanwhile, were not the only inhabitants of this ferocious age. They shared their radiation bath with much more ancient life-forms. To the survivors of the spacetime- chemistry federation, this age of an endless radiation storm was cold, chill, empty, the spacetime defects which characterized their kind scattered and stretched to infinity. But survive they had. Slowly they moved out of their arks and sought new ways to live.
Chapter 44
In the end it took a whole week before Pirius had assembled his team of thirty, including himself and Torec, to serve as primary crew, and nine more as backups. But now there were only seven weeks left before Kimmer’s deadline, and serious work on training and development hadn’t even begun.
Pirius brought his recruits, from Quin and elsewhere, back to Rock 492. Even that was a budget operation; he and Pila had to scrounge spare spaces on scheduled transport ships.
On the journey back from Quin, he couldn’t avoid his other self; whenever they passed each other, their tense silence was chill. Everybody stared, fascinated.
Once back at 492, Red called Burden and Pirius Blue to the office he had had Pila set up. They stood side by side, at attention, but somehow Blue made his insolence show.
“I need two flight commanders,” Pirius Red said without preamble. “So you can guess why I called you here.”
Burden and Pirius Blue glanced at each other.
Burden frowned. Again he seemed oddly evasive. But he said, “It’s not a responsibility I want. But I wouldn’t turn it down.”
Pirius Red nodded. He turned to Blue. “And you?”
Blue was contemptuous. “Do I have a choice?”
Red snapped angrily, “More choice than you gave me when you came back from that magnetar. Look, from my point of view neither of you are ideal candidates. Burden, frankly, I’m suspicious of what’s going on in your head.” Burden looked away. “And Blue — I know you too well, and we’ll never get on. But I need you both; you’re the best I can find. Blue, you of all people know that.”
He waited. At length, Burden accepted the job, but distantly. Blue nodded curtly.
Red was relieved beyond words.
Now he was able to bring both Blue and Burden further into his confidence. All they had known up to this point, like the other candidates, was that the mission would involve difficult flying with novel technology. He began to explain what the target would be.
“You’re insane,” said Pirius Blue. “We’re going to strike at Chandra itself?” But Red saw that his eyes were alive with excitement.
Red said carefully, “You want me to take you off the mission? I could do that, though you know too much now; you’d have to be kept in custody until the flight was over.”
“And let somebody else fly this?” Blue grinned; he looked feral. “Not a chance.”
Pirius turned to Burden. “What about you?”
Burden seemed more troubled. “This could shorten the war.”
“Or lengthen it,” Blue said, “if it goes wrong badly enough.”
“Either way,” said Burden, “things must change.”
Pirius nodded. “Does that trouble you?”
“Whatever we do doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. And it’s a noble action.”
Pirius had trouble decoding this glimpse of an alien mindset. “Does that mean you’re in?”
Again Pirius perceived a flash of fear. Blue saw it, too, and glanced at Burden, worried.
But Burden straightened his shoulders. “Yes, sir!”
Once the last transport had docked, Pirius Red brought his recruits to 492’s largest pressurized dome and had them draw up in good order before him. With Pila at his side, he stood awkwardly on a crate, the only rostrum he could find.
He looked along their lines, at Jees’s clunky artificial torso, at the anomalously old, like Burden, at damaged children like Three — and, Lethe, at his own sullen, other-timeline face. He found it hard to believe that there had been such a rabble drawn up anywhere on the Front in all this war’s long history.
Nevertheless they were a squadron, and they were his.
“Forty of us,” he said. “Forty, including Pila, here, my adjutant. And this is our base. It isn’t much, but it’s ours. And we’re about to be transferred into Strike Arm. We’re a squadron now. And we’re special,” he said.
There was a guffaw, quickly suppressed.
“So we are,” Pirius went on. “We are a special generation, with a special duty, a privilege. The Galaxy-center engagement with the Xeelee began three thousand years ago. And we are the first generation in all those long years to have a chance of winning this war — of winning the Galaxy itself. Whether we succeed or we fail, they will remember us, in the barracks-rooms and the shipyards and the training grounds, and on the battlefields, for a long time to come.”
The crews just stood silently and stared back at him. His words had sounded empty, even to him. His self-doubt quickly gathered.
Enduring Hope spoke up. “We need a name.”
“What’s that?”
“A name. For the squadron. Every squadron needs a name.”
Pila murmured a suggestion in his ear, and he knew it was right. “Exultant,” he said. “We are Exultant Squadron.”
They continued to stare. But then Pirius Blue, his own older self, raised his hands and began to clap, slowly, deliberately. Burden joined in, and Hope, and others; at last they were all applauding together.
When he had dismissed them, Pirius turned to Pila. “Thank you,” he said fervently.
She shrugged. “Next time you make a speech I’ll draft it for you.” A sheaf of Virtuals whirled in the air before her. “In the meantime, Squadron Leader, we have work to do.”
Chapter 45
Among the cultures of matter and antimatter, clinging to their evanescent quark-gluon islands in a sea of radiation, a crisis approached.
As the universe cooled, the rate of production of quarks and anti-quarks from the radiation soup inevitably slowed — but the mutual destruction of the particles continued at a constant rate. Scientists on each side of the parity barrier foresaw a time when no more quarks would coalesce — and then, inevitably, all particles of matter would be annihilated, as would the precisely equal number of particles of antimatter, leaving a universe filled with nothing but featureless, reddening light. It would mean extinction for their kinds of life; it was hardly a satisfactory prospect.
Slowly but surely, plans were drawn up to fix this bug in the universe. At last an empire of matter- cluster creatures discovered that it was possible to meddle with the fundamental bookkeeping of the cosmos.
Human scientists would express much of their physics in terms of symmetries: the conservation of energy, for instance, was really a kind of symmetry. And humans would always believe that a certain symmetry of a combination of electrical charge, left- and right-handedness, and the flow of time could never be violated. But now quark-gluon scientists dug deep into an ancient black hole, which had decayed to expose the singularity at its heart. The singularity was like a wall in the universe — and by reaching through this wall the quark scientists found a way to violate the most fundamental symmetry of all.
The imbalance they induced was subtle: for every thirty million antimatter particles, thirty million and one matter particles would be formed — and when they annihilated, that one spare matter particle would survive.