“So what was the information?” Selby asked. “What the hell did you see?”
“The Adversary,” Larry said. “The Enemy. The Charonians’ enemy. The thing that killed the Shattered Sphere, and wants to try and kill the Sphere that’s holding Earth.”
Selby, Marcia and Vespasian exchanged glances with each other. “Look,” Vespasian said, his voice more than a little patronizing, “maybe you’d better start at the beginning.”
“Maybe I’d better,” Larry said, a bit irritably. “In ten minutes. After I’ve had a chance to wash my face and get into some clothes. And someplace besides here, with you three clustered around my bed.”
Marcia looked at her companions, a bit uncertainly. “All right,” she said. “There’s a conference room just down the hall. We’ll meet you there whenever you’re ready.”
Selby seemed about to protest, but Marcia gestured for her to be quiet. “We’ll be outside,” Marcia said.
Larry watched them go, more than a little surprised at himself. What had gotten into him? That was not the way he acted. But then it dawned on him. He remembered back to five years ago, to the way he and Lucian had bickered and argued. What had gotten into him, indeed.
That was the way Lucian acted.
Larry felt a little more settled—and quite literally more himself— when he came out and found the others in the conference room. It was rather satisfying to have the others being careful not to upset him again, treating him with a bit of fearful courtesy. It had clearly dawned on them that he had what they needed, and that bullying him might not be the best idea. They all got through an awkward series of pleasantries. Then Larry sat down at the head of the table, and started talking.
“I got a lot more from Lucian. Maybe even more than I think. It was like he was whispering to me as he showed me what we all saw. That’s not quite accurate, because he still had a great deal of trouble talking—but I know he gave me much more than you got.”
He hesitated for a moment, trying to decide how to start. “You have to go back a long time,” he said at last. “I don’t know how far back. I got a pretty good feel for shorter time spans, but time spans of any length get pretty tricky because—well, maybe you’ll see. It was millions of years ago, at any rate. Maybe five million, maybe a hundred and fifty million. The Charonians were already well established by then. They had spread across a large part of the galaxy, building their Spheres and collecting their worlds into Multisystems. Back then there was no fear and caution about them. They didn’t have anything to hide from.
“All the Sphere systems were connected to each other by wormhole links, and the Spheres stayed in close contact with each other, trading worlds and life-forms and new information back and forth across the links. Maybe at the peak of it all, there was a network of a few thousand Spheres.”
“So what happened then?” Marcia asked.
“What happened was they discovered they weren’t the only ones using gravity and wormholes.”
“These Adversaries you mentioned,” Selby suggested. “There’s only one of them,” Larry said. “It can subdivide itself and then remerge the divisions as it sees fit. Group and individual don’t mean much to it. But it can and does split up into as many bits as it likes.”
“What do these bits look like?” Vespasian asked.
“They’re spherical. They have to be. Usually a dirty grey in color, but that’s just debris that accumulates on the surface. They can be any size—but the ones that take on a Sphere might be the size of a CORE or an average asteroid.”
“Why do they have to be spherical?” Marcia asked.
“They’re pulled into that shape by the force of gravity,” Larry said. “They’re small, but they are extremely massive. I can’t say for sure, because it wasn’t in the memory store Lucian showed me, but I think they’re made out of strange matter, with densities comparable to neutron stars. A blob of Adversary the size of a large dog would outweigh a good-sized asteroid.”
“Strange matter? What the bloody hell is strange matter?” Selby asked.
“An alternative form of matter—or at least, an alternative form of heavy particles like protons and neutrons.”
“Like antimatter?” Selby asked.
“No, no, not at all like antimatter,” Marcia said. “Antimatter blows up if it touches matter, so it doesn’t last very long. Strange matter could exist perfectly well in our Universe—if it existed. And it sounds like it does.”
“So why so dense?” Vespasian asked.
“There are upper limits on the size of the atomic nucleus in normal matter,” Marcia said. “Anything much above uranium is unstable— it decays. In theory, there are no limits on the size of an atomic nucleus made up of strange quarks. You could have a strange atom with an atomic weight billions or trillions of times higher than in normal matter.”
“But no one has ever seen strange matter, right?” Vespasian said.
Marcia looked to Larry. “Not until now.”
Larry sighed in frustration. “Look, I know it all sounds mad, but there it is. It’s true.”
“This is what Lucian told you, or showed you,” Marcia said. “That doesn’t mean it’s true. He could be wrong, or insane, or you could have misunderstood.”
“Or he could be exactly right,” Larry said, feeling a bit annoyed. “I know it seems impossible for something that small to attack the Charonians, but hear me out, all right?”
Vespasian shrugged. “Five years ago, who would have believed that a monster inside the Moon was going to steal the Earth? You go on, Larry. Tell us.”
“All right. Thank you. I don’t pretend to understand everything about it, but the Adversary is the key to it. It is capable of action, organized action, but I’m not even sure we’d consider it to be alive.”
“What sort of action are you talking about?” Vespasian asked.
Larry gave him a funny look. “Killing Spheres, of course.”
“Wait a second,” Marcia protested. “How could a thing that small kill a Sphere?”
“Look, let me tell this from the beginning and it might make more sense. We think the Charonians, the Spheres, evolved from some intelligent species, more or less like us, that sent out an automatic seedship programmed to modify the genetics of the life-forms it was carrying, adapting them to the planet it encountered—except the seedship took over, and the life-forms served it, and not the other way around. The Charonians merged biology and technology and guided their own development, their own evolution, until they got to the system of Spheres. As best I can understand it, the Adversary did the same thing, guided its own development. It’s as if… I don’t know… an amoeba, a very simple animal, evolved intelligence, and figured out how to make a new and better type of amoeba out of itself.”
“But an amoeba is nowhere near complex enough to have anything remotely like intelligence,” Marcia protested. “All sorts of research demonstrates you need to reach a complexity threshold much higher than you can get in a single cell before you have the capacity for intelligence. You can’t do it in one cell.”
“Not if you build that cell out of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen. But the atoms building up this creature might each have more particles, more neutrons and protons, than there are atoms in an amoeba. The complexity is there, but it’s at the nuclear level.”
“Wait a second,” Vespasian protested. “I thought Marcia said no one had ever detected strange matter. Where is this thing supposed to live?”