If it was a universe, then what they saw wasn’t its surface; that had no meaning. They saw its outer boundary, and that also had no meaning. What did the boundary of a universe look like from outside? Or from inside? If it was a universe it was infinite; inside was neverending so outside, where they were, was neverbeginning.
The dissonant chorus of instruments continued. Everything in the ship tried to probe it, but it was denser than Horus 4, or a neutron star, or billions of either. It couldn’t exist in their universe, and the Bridge screen said it didn’t; or couldn’t, which was different. If it did exist its gravity would have annihilated both ships in the instant of its creation, but to one side of it was Faith and to the other side, further away, was the Charles Manson, and they registered no gravity. The thing between them, separating them by a few thousand feet and billions of light-years, behaved as if they didn’t exist, just as it didn’t exist for them; or couldn’t, which was different.
Smithson was laughing. Not cruelly, as he usually did, but in wonderment.
“She’s actually done it.”
“The screen may be wrong.”
“No, Commander. It may be wrong about details, how and when it collapses, but not about what it is.” He laughed again, softly. “The only way She could hold us off is to put a universe between us. Can there be a bigger compliment? We thought we’d learn new things about Her.”
“I don’t…”
“Yes you do, Commander, you do understand. You were right, She made it deliberately. And it’s made of us and Her. Together. Its life will be only seconds or minutes to us, but to them it’s eternity.”
“Them?”
Smithson looked away. He seemed to be blinking.
Thahl said “Commander, he means the living things that will grow and die inside it. They must have already evolved…we may all meet again in there, Commander, and not know it.”
Foord looked away. He too seemed to be blinking.
“Commander,” Cyr said, “do we still fire on it?”
“Not this time. Whatever She’s done, it must play itself out.”
“But…”
“First, it’s not really there. Second, if it is it’s beyond our weapons. And third…I’ve destroyed ships. I might destroy cities if I had to. But a universe?”
“Made by Her.”
“The fourth reason. We’re part of Her. We always were.”
Again he found himself blinking back tears.
It hung before them on the screen. The ship’s voice—its instruments, all unable to reach a conclusion—sang it through its life.
•
The alarms murmured. The two ships faced each other across Her universe, which could not exist as a discrete object between them because it was infinite.
In five seconds and a billion years following its creation, it formed its time and space and physical laws. It formed nebulae; nebulae congealed locally into stars; stars were organised and spun into galaxies, measuring molecules and light-years across their spiral arms. Around some stars it formed planets.
Fifteen seconds and three billion years into its existence, it was teeming with life and death. A minority of lifeforms developed civilisations, and a minority of civilisations flourished, lasting millionths of a second and thousands of years. A smaller minority of civilisations spanned more than one solar system. There was even an unidentified ship, prowling the dark spaces between galaxies. More than one, but they rarely met or communicated.
Her universe, like any other, was mostly empty. Its emptiness dwarfed suns, whose light guttered like cigarette-ends dropped in a derelict building. Only one time in millions would light produce life where it landed. Civilisations began and ended their lives along its timeline, in packets of millionths of a second and thousands of years. The atoms and subatomic particles of Foord and Thahl and Cyr and Smithson and Kaang—of their replicas in the crater, or their replicas from the Bridge, or the thousands of reproductions of both which had tumbled out of Her—went into Her universe and reappeared in living things. Occasionally they existed in the same galaxy; less occasionally, in solar systems close to each other; almost never, in the same solar system; less than almost never, on the same planet; and less than that, in forms that would recognise each other.
Once, on a planet circling a dying red sun, an individual with some of Foord’s particles came within a few feet of an individual with some of Thahl’s.They glanced at each other and passed by. One was chitinous, part of a collective hive; the other was feathered, pecking at a fruit like an apple. Later they died. Five seconds and a billion years afterwards, their sun went nova. An unidentified ship watched it from a distance of atoms and light-years, and turned away towards the next solar system.
•
She began Her endgame. For the second time the Bridge screen went dark, and She brought them into Her universe. There was no compression: they stayed as they were, but reality around them changed, instantly, from outside to inside.
Every part of Her universe, because it was infinite, touched every part of theirs. It welcomed them with a noiseless rushing. Foord shouted to them, above the noiselessness, We’ll come out at Sakhra, then all this will be finished. Finished abruptly. After everything which had gone before, Her endgame was simple and abrupt. Fast, and final. It was Her last throw of the dice.
Foord knew Her better now, and knew what She had done. She was a conventional ship with a conventional opponent, and the opponent was matching Her—perhaps, with Foord’s careful penny pieces, more than matching Her. She was also something else, something which could make and encompass universes, and She had drawn on the second identity to meet the threat to the first. But that, Foord knew, would also threaten the second identity.
They passed through Her universe like ghosts, unseeing and unseen. They were almost nothing: a movement of air, an echo, a deepening of colour. As they passed, their traces altered with the magnitude of what they passed through—a planet, a continent, a room.
It contained random particles from them and Her, and multitudes from neither. It contained civilisations which grew and died in different galaxies at different times, without knowing each other. Some resembled the Commonwealth or the Sakhran Empire, and some were unimaginably different. Some were visited by an unidentified ship, and collapsed or declined after it left them. Some had an individual who wrote a book about what the ship was. Some sent an opponent to engage it singly.
They saw no more of Her universe than it did of them. For seconds, and billions of years, they ghosted through it. Orders of magnitude. If it was a universe, they passed only six of its planets, in six different solar systems in six different galaxies, on the route She had set to bring them out at Sakhra. It was a short journey, less than the span of one grain of sand on a beach; and in the mere seconds and billions of years it lasted, Foord finally understood.
I know what She is. I know what Srahr wrote.
•
On an uninhabited planet of dark slate, their passing was an extra quiver in a column of smoke. The smoke rose from a hut standing by itself on the slopes of a mountain. Someone had come there, to live and die alone.