The work was good. And now it was ready.
…There was a discontinuity. All over the Universe the pods vanished like soap bubbles.
The seed pods’ long journey back through time had begun. They would emerge a mere hundred thousand years after the singularity itself, at the moment when the temperature of the cosmos had cooled sufficiently for matter and radiation to become decoupled — so that the infant Universe became suddenly transparent, as if with a clash of cymbals.
Then the creatures within would unfold their limbs, and the long Project of the Xeelee would begin.
Eventually the Project would lead to the development of the seed pods, the spawning of the antiXeelee itself; and so the circle would be closed. There was, of course, no paradox about this causal loop; although — for amusement — the antiXeelee had once studied a toy-creature, a human from whose viewpoint such events had seemed not merely paradoxical but impossible. Something like a smile reflex spread through its awareness. (… And, revived like an afterthought by the immense memory, the toy-creature whispered once more into being, a faint coherence in the vacuum.)
So its work was done; the antiXeelee could let go. It spread wide and thin.
Forgotten, the toy-creature stirred like an insect in its cocoon.
Paul opened his eyes.
The antiXeelee hovered over Paul.
He was — discorporeal; it was as if the jewel of consciousness which had lain behind his eyes had been plucked out of his body and flung into space. He did not even have heartbeats to count. He remembered ruefully the casual contempt with which he had regarded Taft, Green and the rest on the Sugar Lump, how he had soared over their shambling, makeshift bodies, their limited awareness!
…And yet now, stranded, with no idea why he was here, he would have given a great deal to return to the comforting furniture of a human body.
At least the antiXeelee was here with him. It was like a great ceiling under which he hovered and buzzed, insectlike. He sensed a vast, satisfied weariness in its mood, the contentment of the traveler at the end of a long and difficult road. For a long time he stayed within the glow of its protection.
Then it began to dissolve.
Paul wanted to cry out, like a child after its huge parent. He was buffeted, battered. It was as if a glacier of memories and emotions was calving into a hundred icebergs about him; and now those icebergs in turn burst into shards which melted into the surface of a waiting sea…
With a brief, non-localized burst of selectrons and neutralinos the awareness of the antiXeelee multiplied, fragmented, shattered, sank into the vacuum.
And Paul was left alone.
It was impossible to measure time, other than by the slow evolution of his own emotions.
He had lived among people no more than a few months, on the Xeelee seed pod they had called the Sugar Lump; but in that time he had been shown visions, sounds, scents, tactile images from all the worlds of the human empire, and he had formed an impression of the great storm of souls that constituted the human race. Each of those souls, he knew, was like a tiny line drawn in space-time, with a neat start, a thickening into self-awareness and a clean conclusion. The race was — had been — a vast, dynamic drawing of billions of such lifelines.
He, Paul, spoiled the picture.
His lifeline began in a tight, acausal knot wrapped around the Sugar Lump — and was then dragged across the face of the picture like a vandal’s scribble — and finished here, a loose end beyond the conclusion of history.
He felt no privilege to be here. His life was artificial, a construct, a random jotting of the Xeelee. He could see inside stars… but he had never looked into a human heart.
He endured despair. Why had he been brought to this point in space-time and then so casually abandoned? Had he been correct in detecting a strain of amusement in the vast, crashing symphony of the antiXeelee’s thoughts? Was he truly no more than a toy?
The despair turned to anger, and lasted a long time.
Later he became curious about the aging Universe around him. He had no senses, of course: no eyes, no ears, no fingers; nevertheless he tried to construct a simulacrum of a human awareness, to assign human labels to the objects and processes around him.
There were still stars. He saw sheets of them, bands and rays, complex arrays.
Evidently the Xeelee had remade the Universe.
But there were anomalies. He found many supernova sites, swelling giants, wizened dwarfs: the stars were aged, more aged than he had expected. Clearly many millions of years had passed since his time on the Sugar Lump — enough time for the Xeelee to have completed their galactic engineering — yet this immense duration was insignificant on the cosmic scale.
So why did the stars seem so old? He found no answer.
Driven by curiosity he began to experiment with his awareness. Physically he was composed of a tight knot of quantum wave functions; now, cautiously, he began to unravel that knot, to allow the focus of his consciousness to slide over space-time. Soon it was as if he was flying over the arch of the cosmos, unbound by limits of space or time.
He descended through the plane of the Galaxy, his sense-analogues spread wide.
Much of the Milky Way, he found, had been rebuilt. Huge constructs, some light years across, had been assembled: there were rings, sheets, ribbons of stars, stars surrounded by vast artifacts — rings, spheres, polyhedra. In these celestial cities the component stars appeared to have been selected — or, perhaps, built — with great discrimination. Here, for example, was a ring of a dozen Sol-like yellow dwarfs surrounding a brooding red giant; the dwarfs circled their parent so closely that Paul could see how they dipped into the turbulent outer layers of the giant’s red flesh. The dwarfs in that necklet must once have been utterly identical, but now time had taken its tolclass="underline" one of the dwarfs even appeared to have suffered a minor nova explosion — the shrunken remnant was surrounded by a shell of expanding, cooling debris — and the rest were fading to dimness, their hydrogen fuel depleted and vast spots disfiguring their shining surfaces.
Throughout the Galaxy Paul found evidence of such decay.
He was saddened by what he saw… and puzzled. He had noted this star aging before; and the time scales still did not make sense.
Something, some agency, had aged the stars.
Paul soared beneath the plane of the Galaxy. The great disc was a ceiling of curdled gold above him. The spiral arms were devastated: made ragged, the spirals disrupted by the blisters of yellow-red light which swelled across the lanes of dust.
Those blisters were supernova remnants. Enduring forced aging, a lot of the more spectacular, and beautiful, spiral arm stars would simply explode, tearing themselves apart… probably there had been chain reactions of supernovae, with the wreckage of one star destabilizing another.
Paul stared up at the wreckage of the disc, the muddled spiral arms.
Some things remained the same, though. Paul saw how the great star system rotated as one, as if solid. The Galaxy’s visible matter was no more than a fraction of its total bulk; a vast, invisible halo of dark matter swathed the bright spiral, so that the light matter lay at the bottom of a deep gravity pit, turning like an oil drop in a puddle.
Now Paul climbed out of that huge, deep gravity well and passed through the halo of dark matter. The ghostly stuff barely impinged on his awareness. Photinos — the dark matter particles — interacted with normal matter only through the gravitational force, so that even to Paul the halo was like the faintest mist.