‘The nebulae themselves can be full of heavy elements. In Beta, stellar evolution proceeded fast, and churned the primordial hydrogen and helium through fusion processes much more rapidly than here. And the flare stars do more processing in turn. Marshal, those nebulae contain oxygen. You could breathe the air!’
Marshal Sand seemed unimpressed. ‘Well, of course. Otherwise the crew of the Constancy could not have survived.’
‘No indeed. They fell through Bolder’s Ring into air they could breathe, and adapted, and survived, and spread through the nebula . . .
‘Marshal, I believe that because of its ferociously strong gravity, Beta’s cosmogony must be accelerated. If the initial Big Bang singularity was like ours, a great spewing of hot hydrogen and helium, gravity would have started to compete with the universal expansion much earlier. Massive stars and huge black holes must have formed quickly, and churned through the raw material of the interstellar medium. And the cosmos itself is ageing much more rapidly too. In Alpha the smallest stars, with a mass of perhaps a tenth of Sol – red dwarfs – are the longest-lived. They may last a hundred trillion years, perhaps ten thousand times longer than a medium mass star like Sol.’
‘The photino birds may have something to say about that picture.’
‘Oh, the photino birds seem to like red dwarfs . . . The point, Marshal, is that in universe Beta a Sol-mass star’s lifetime would not span five billion years but a mere five years.’
Sand stared. ‘It’s barely believable.’
‘Yes. But it’s simply a matter of proportion. A star’s lifetime scales inversely as the gravitational constant. And even the most parsimonious red dwarf would last only perhaps a million years – which is thus, I believe, roughly the span of Beta’s stelliferous age.’
‘A million years, and then the stars die,’ the Marshal pondered. ‘But Lura’s people have already been in there about that expanse of time.’
‘Quite. They were lucky, Marshal; their ancestors stumbled into Beta when that universe was very young.’
‘You’d think people would know they didn’t belong there,’ Coton blurted. ‘They wouldn’t have to remember by repeating nursery rhymes.’
‘How so?’ Sand asked.
‘Because they can’t eat the native life, for one thing. Lura told me. And then there’s evolution.’ He glanced at Vala, uncertain, but she nodded encouragement. ‘It took billions of years for complex life to evolve on Earth. But if universe Beta is only a million years old, there hasn’t been enough time for humans to evolve.’ Another thought struck him. ‘Or the trees, or the whales. Where did they come from?’
Vala smiled. ‘Good thinking, grandson! Of course you’re right. I can only conclude that the whales and the trees and whatnot are refugees like the humans – not from our universe, but from others linked by wormholes to Beta, from universes Gamma and Delta and Epsilon! Beta is a particularly porous place, I suspect. Gravity has surely twisted it up on a cosmological scale, and torn holes in it everywhere . . . Perhaps it’s no surprise that it was Beta that the Constancy crew fell into; in the greater Bulk of universes this sponge-like cosmos must be something of a sink. That’s not to say Beta couldn’t host native life of its own,’ she mused. ‘Fast-living creatures of exotic physics, perhaps, down in the highly stressed spacetime around those big black holes. Lura says there have been observations of something like that. But not biochemical like our own.’
‘And still the castaways linger on,’ Sand said. ‘A minor, but remarkable, story of human endurance. Perhaps after all this time we should leave them be. Beta is, by now, their home . . . Ah, but it is dying.’
‘I’m afraid so. They have surely had to flee before, within Beta – Lura has told us fragmentary tales of stars dying and nebulae becoming exhausted. But when the last stars go out there will be nowhere left to run.
‘And things may get worse yet, and quite quickly. Unlike our universe, which seems destined to endless expansion, Beta, dominated by gravity, will collapse back to a Big Crunch. I don’t know when this will be – we need better data and subtler modelling – but not long! Not compared to our own cosmological timescales.’
‘So is it a coincidence that we have made contact with Lura just as her universe is failing?’
‘No,’ Vala said. ‘Remember, it was the Mole that called us. A component of the starship. Despite its own “massive sensor dysfunction” it seems to have perceived the problems ahead.’
‘And it sent a distress message out of its own universe? That seems quite a conceptual leap.’
‘Actually it seems to have sent its messages inwards towards the Core of Cores. That’s where local spacetime is most distorted, and the machine’s message had the best chance of leaking out into the wider Bulk.’ She coughed. ‘There are more speculative possibilities. As I said there may be concentrations of complex matter there, around the Core of Cores. Maybe there is life there – even intelligence—’
Sand dismissed that. ‘Idle guesswork. The point is this Mole did manage to get its message out, to be picked up by the alien thing in your grandson’s head.’
Coton thought he felt that phantom ache deep in the core of his brain.
‘The question now is how we proceed,’ Vala said.
Sand frowned. ‘Proceed to do what?’
‘Why, to help them, of course. They are humans, Marshal Sand, whose ancestors became castaways following their duty!’
‘Their “duty” was to a government that has long vanished, in a long-forgotten war—’
‘Against the same enemy,’ Vala said quietly.
The Marshal stared at her. Then she paced, impatient, one hand slapping her hip. ‘All this is a . . . curiosity. I can see your motivation, Academician. You have spent your life trying to save other relics of dead wars, such as the Starfolk. But what, in the end, can you actually do for these people? They are in another universe – and I have other priorities. I’m under pressure to tidy up here—’
‘“Tidy up”?’
‘I’m aware of the cultural and historical sensitivities,’ Sand said wearily. ‘But the military priority is to fall back to the Orion-line Wall zone, before the pressure of the Scourge in this region becomes overwhelming. And at the Wall itself, where the demarcation lines are being drawn, there is already some trouble among the displaced, the refugees . . .’ She took off her elaborate peaked cap and rubbed her stubbly hair. ‘Yet I am not without compassion, Academician. And curiosity. You may continue with this, for now. But whatever you intend to do, get it done quickly.’ And she placed her cap back on her head and walked out.
Vala sighed. She came to sit beside Coton. ‘Well, we’re going to have to get on with it – and so are Lura and her people.’
‘Get on with what?’
Vala smiled and stroked his cheek. ‘To retrace their steps through Bolder’s Ring is out of the question . . . I suppose teleportation is a possibility. I’ll have to look into it. Go poking around the museums again . . . Do you feel up to talking to the castaways some more? Whatever we do is going to depend on having some kind of anchor at their end. They need to get hold of more high technology, more relics of the ship. There must be some. Perhaps they can find this “Raft” Lura spoke of—’
He cut through the torrent of words. ‘Grandmother, I don’t understand. Are you going to save the people in Beta?’
She smiled. ‘Of course I am. What else?’ She stood up. ‘I’ve a lot to do. You rest, and when you feel up to it try to contact Lura again.’ She patted his shoulder and walked off across the floor of the Map Room.