“That’s shot us full of all sorts of funny stuff,” shouted sWyman. “Particles you wouldn’t believe, radiation at all wavelengths—”
I didn’t reply. There was a shape hovering out there, a night-dark bird with wings hundreds of miles across.
“Xeelee,” I breathed. “That’s what I saw in the ship swarm. The Xeelee are here. That’s a nightfighter—”
sWyman roared in frustration.
The Xeelee let us have it. I saw the exterior of the window glow cherry-red; gobbets melted and flew away. The Xeelee dipped his wings, once; and he flew away.
Then the window opaqued.
Something hit my head in the whirling darkness. The noise, the burning smells, sWyman’s yelled complaints — it all faded away.
“…Damn those Xeelee. I should have known they can beat anything we’ve got. And of course they would police this lithium beacon. It wouldn’t do to let us lesser types get our hands on stuff like this; oh no…”
I was drifting in a steamy darkness. There was a smell of smoke. I coughed, searched for a coffee globe. “At least the Xeelee attack stopped that damn rotation.” sWyman shut up, as if cut off. “What’s our status, sWyman?”
“Nothing that counts is working. Oh, there’s enough to let us interpret the quagma encounter… But, Luce, the inseparability packet link is smashed. We can’t talk to home.” Cradling the cooling globe I probed at my feelings. There was despair, certainly; but over it all I felt an unbearable shame.
I’d let my life be stolen. And, in the end, it was for nothing.
sWyman hissed quietly.
“How’s the life support, by the way?” I asked.
“What life support?”
I let the globe join the cabin’s floating debris and felt my way to the opaqued window. It felt brittle, half-melted. It would stay opaqued forever, I realized.
“sWyman. Tell me what happened. When that quagma droplet lunged out of its orbit and sprayed us.”
“Yeah. Well, the particles from the quagma burst left tracks like vapor trails in the matter they passed through.” I remembered how that invisible shower had prickled. The scars laced everything — the hull, the equipment, even your body. And the tracks weren’t random. There was a pattern to them. There was enough left working in here for me to decipher some of the message…”
I felt my skin crawl. “A message. You’re telling me there was information content in the scar patterns?”
“Yes,” said sWyman casually. I guess he’d had time to get used to the idea. “But what we can’t do is tell anyone about it.”
I held my breath. “Do you want to tell me?”
“Yeah…”
It was less than a second after the Big Bang.
Already there was life.
They swarmed through a quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. The oldest of them told legends of the singularity. The young scoffed, but listened in secret awe.
But the quagma was cooling. Their life-sustaining fluid was congealing into cold hadrons. Soon, the very superforce which bound their bodies would disintegrate.
They were thinking beings. Their scientists told them the end of the world, seconds away, would be followed by an eternal cold. There was nothing they could do about it.
They could not bear to be forgotten.
So they built… an ark. A melon-sized pod of quagma containing all their understanding. And they set up that unmistakable lithium-7 flare, a sign that someone had been here, at the dawn of time.
For trillions of seconds the ark waited. At last cold creatures came to see. And the ark began to tell its story.
I floated there, thinking about it. The scars lacing the pod — even my body — held as much of the understanding of the quagma creatures as they could give us. If I could have returned home engineers could have dissected the pod, doctors could have studied the tracery of tracks in my flesh; and the patterns they found could have been unscrambled.
Perhaps we would never decipher it all. Perhaps much of it would be meaningless to us. I didn’t know. It didn’t matter. For the existence of the ark was itself the quagma datum, the single key fact:
That they had been here.
And so the ark serves its purpose.
sWyman fell silent.
I drifted away from the buckled walls and began to curl up. There was a band of pain across my chest; the air must be fouling.
How long since I’d dropped out of Susy-space? Had my four days gone?
My vision started to break up. I hoped sWyman wouldn’t speak again.
Something scraped the outside of the pod.
“Luce?” sWyman whispered. “What was that?”
The scrape went the length of the pod; then came a more solid clang over the mid-section. “I’d say someone’s trying to get hold of us.”
“Who, damn it?”
I pressed my ear to a smooth patch of hull. I heard music, a bass harmonization that rumbled through the skin of the pod.
“Of course. The Ghosts. They’re right on time.”
“No.” There was a bray in his voice. “They’re too late. Our Susy-drive took the Xeelee by surprise, but if the Ghosts try to get any closer to the quagma you can bet they’ll be stopped.”
“But—” I stopped to suck oxygen out of the thick air. “The Ghosts don’t need to get any closer. The quagma data is stored in the scarred fabric of the pod itself. So if they take the pod they’ve won…”
Then, incredibly, I felt a glimmer of hope. It was like a thread of blue oxygen.
I tried to think it through. Could I actually live through this?
To Lethe’s waters with it. I’d been a passive observer through this whole thing; now, if I was going to die, at least I could choose how. I began stripping off my scorched coverall. “sWyman, listen to me. Is there a way you can destroy the pod?”
He was silent for a moment. “Why should I want to?”
“Just tell me.” I was naked. I wadded my clothes behind an equipment box.
“I could destabilize the fusion torus,” he said slowly. “Oh. I get it.”
“I presume the Ghosts have been monitoring us,” I said breathlessly. “So they’ll know that my flesh, my clothes, the fabric of the pod, contain the information they want.
“But if the pod’s destroyed… if everything except me — even my clothes — has gone… then the Ghosts will have to preserve me. Right? My body will be the only record.”
“It’s a massive gamble, Luce. You have to rely on the Ghosts knowing enough about human physiology to keep you alive… but not enough to take you apart for the quagma secrets. So they’d have to return you to Earth, to human care—”
“I don’t perceive too many alternatives.” I grabbed the frame of the pod window. “Will you do it?” More scrapes; a judder sideways.
“It means destroying myself.” He sounded scared.
I wanted to scream. “sWyman, your original is waiting for word of us, safe on Earth. If I get through this I’ll tell him what you did.”
He hesitated for five heartbeats.
Then: “Okay. Keep your mouth open when you jump. Godspeed, Michael—”
Grasping the frame with both hands I swung my feet at the window. The blistered stuff smashed easily and the fragments rushed away. Escaping air sparkled into ice. Sound sucked away and my ears popped with a wincing pain.
Snowflakes of air billowed from my open mouth, and gas tore from my bowels.
I closed my freezing eyes and felt my way around the hull. Then I kicked away as hard as I could.
I waited five seconds, then risked one last look. The Ghosts’ moon ship was a silvered landscape, tilted up to my right. A thick hose snaked up to the ripped-open pod. Chrome spheres clustered around the pod like bacteria over a wound.