Phase Space (60 page)

‘Oh,’ said one young beauty called Glimmer. ‘Oh, but the tripling has begun. They sing the songs already. Can you hear?’

Of course they could. The songs emerged from the swelling, swooping crowd of the We Who Sing, songs of sex, of light-filled, orgasmic instants of birth and death, of an Ocean-world like a womb. The dances were beginning too. Patterns, beautiful, in three dimensions and on a vast scale, were soon emergent from the people’s unconscious flocking.

‘I don’t want it to be true,’ moaned Harmony. ‘How can
this
end? I want to go to the dance, to the triples. Let us go, Shine. Oh, let us go!’

Some of the rest joined in this desolate chorus. The group spun and pulsed, confused, unstable.

It felt as if Shine herself was tearing apart. How wonderful it would be to think that even now, if she let herself dissolve into the burning light of a triple, something of herself would go on, enduring forever, in an Ocean without end, a song without limits!

Oh, she thought, I love it all.

But she knew that beneath the dazzling dance of the people lay the chill, implacable logic of Cold. There was no escape.

‘It is time,’ she said, sadly. ‘We must do as Cold instructed us. Come now.’

She swam up to Glimmer and let her perimeter soften, so that they overlapped, the complex weft of their cores overlaying. It was like a tripling, but they kept their identities separate.

Now another joined them, and another, so that they grew into a huddle, an increasingly dense, glowing mass that looked, from the outside, undifferentiated – and yet the individuals were sustained within, like palimpsests.

‘I don’t like this,’ whispered Glimmer – very bright, very immature, terrified by the clarity of her own thinking. ‘It feels strange.’

‘Cold thought it might help us survive –’

‘Survive what?’ Harmony’s pulsing voice was full of anger and fear. ‘The death of the Ocean itself? Do you really believe that, Shine?’

‘If you wish to leave,’ Shine said, ‘you may.’ Like her triple-mother, Harmony sought nothing so much as somebody to punish.

But now their argument was ended. The Ocean itself shuddered –
and it dimmed.

The We Who Sing could not ignore the dimming: even the youngest, the most foolish of them. Striving to continue their anxious dancing before the approaching Wave, they swarmed, agitated.

Harmony stayed where she was, embedded deep in the huddle.

It was just as Cold had forecast. Despair clamp down inside Shine, the last impossible hope evaporate.

She felt Glimmer within her, as if snuggling close.

‘Shine –’

‘You’re frightened. It’s all right. So am I.’

‘What will we see?’

Shine struggled to answer. What would be left if the Ocean vanished? – for the Ocean
was
the world. ‘Perhaps there is a greater Ocean,’ she said at last. ‘In which our Ocean is embedded. As one becomes embedded in the three of a triple.’

‘And,’ Glimmer said suddenly, ‘perhaps there is a greater Ocean beyond that. And then another.’

This keen, intelligent insight startled Shine. But as she tried to imagine an infinite hierarchy of Oceans, each contained within the next, she recoiled, bewildered.

Now the Ocean’s light flickered again, like a failing lightbulb, visibly dimmer.

The swarming people were confused, agitated. Some of them even strove to join Shine’s huddle.

But it was too late.

The great Wave broke, a last defiant burst of light that swept them all before it.

The We Who Sing shrieked and danced and sang, and they tripled madly. Young emerged in silent starbursts. They raced over the Wave’s swelling face, exhilarated to find themselves suddenly alive.

Even now, Shine longed to join them.

But once again the light dimmed. The Wave’s rushing front was disrupted, becoming turbulent. The dances were broken, and the songs of the people turned to wails of fear, the bewildered young crying for comfort.

Shine gathered her acolytes close. She said, ‘I think –’

But there was no more time.

At last a critical temperature was reached. Suddenly, atomic matter was able to condense out of the stew of electrons and nuclei.

The photons – no longer energetic enough to smash open the fledgling atoms, no longer impeded – were free to fly their geodesic courses to infinity. The plasma glow died.

For the first time the sky became transparent, a transition as abrupt as a clash of cymbals.

With the dissipation of the plasma, the great acoustic waves had no medium in which to travel. But they did not vanish without trace. Where a wave had compressed the particle soup, it had been made hotter, the photons more energetic. And so as the photons began their endless journey through swelling spacetime, they carried in their energy distribution images of the last sound waves.

Thus the last birthing cry of the universe was caught forever in a thinning, reddening sea of primordial photons.

Meanwhile the matter that had suddenly frosted out of the great bath of radiation began to gather in swirls and clumps, arranged in a great lacy tapestry that hung over the universe. It was a wispy frost of hydrogen and helium, slowly collapsing under gravity: a frost that would condense into galaxies and stars and superclusters and planets, places where new forms of life could prosper.

In all cosmic history it was the most dramatic instant of transition.

But, with every transition, there is loss.

Dark and cold, suddenly, everywhere.

Many of the huddle had died in that first great instant of freezing.

And now, as the mass clump collapsed, fusion began, deep in the heart of the huddle. At that moment more died, torn apart by the immense densities, the sudden fire.

But the fusion became stable.

In all the universe, just a single star shone.

Shine peered out, filled with curiosity and fear, stunned by clarity and emptiness.

Cold was right, she thought. I am alive. I lived through the end of the world. Alive! But – what happens next?

As she watched, a second star lit up, a beacon in the endless dark.

And then another.

And another.

And perhaps (Malenfant wrote to Michael) life will persist long after we imagine it would be impossible: deep in the future, far downstream, after the Earth has died, after the sun and all the stars have expired, life finding a way to get by in the dark …

Call her Anlic.

The first time she woke, she was in the ruins of an abandoned gravity mine.

At first the Community had chased around the outer strata of the great gloomy structure. But at last, close to the core, they reached a cramped ring. Here the central black-hole’s gravity was so strong that light itself curved in closed orbits.

The torus tunnel looked infinitely long. And they could race as fast as they dared.

As they hurtled past fullerene walls they could see multiple images of themselves, a glowing golden mesh before and behind, for the echoes of their light endlessly circled the central knot of spacetime. ‘Just like the old days!’ they called, excited. ‘Just like the Afterglow! …’

Exhilarated, they pushed against the light barrier, and those trapped circling images shifted to blue or red.

That was when it happened.

This Community was just a small tributary of the Conflux: isolated here in this ancient place, the density of mind already stretched thin. And now, as lightspeed neared, that isolation stretched to breaking point.

… She budded off from the rest, her consciousness made discrete, separated from the greater flow of minds and memories.

She slowed. The others rushed on without her, a dazzling circular storm orbiting the exhausted black hole. It felt like coming awake, emerging from a dream.

Her questions were immediate, flooding her raw mind. ‘Who am I? How did I get here?’ And so on. The questions were simple, even trite. And yet they were unanswerable.

Others gathered around her – curious, sympathetic – and the race of streaking light began to lose its coherence.

One of them came to her.

Names meant little; this ‘one’ was merely a transient sharpening of identity from the greater distributed entity that made up the Community.

Still, here he was. Call him Geador.

‘ … Anlic?’

‘I feel – odd,’ she said.

‘Don’t worry.’

‘Who am I?’

‘Come back to us.’

He reached for her, and she sensed the warm depths of companionship and memory and shared joy that lay beyond him. Depths waiting to swallow her up, to obliterate her questions.

She snapped, ‘No!’ And, wilfully, she sailed up and out and away, passing through the thin walls of the tunnel.

At first it was difficult to climb out of this twisted gravity well. But soon she was rising through layers of structure.

Here was the tight electromagnetic cage which had once tapped the spinning black hole like a dynamo. Here was the cloud of compact masses which had been hurled along complex orbits through the hole’s ergosphere, extracting gravitational energy. It was antique engineering, long abandoned.

She emerged into a blank sky, a sky stretched thin by the endless expansion of spacetime.

Geador was here. ‘What do you see?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Look harder.’ He showed her how.

There was a scattering of dull red pinpoints all around the sky.

‘They are the remnants of stars,’ he said.

He told her about the Afterglow: that brief, brilliant period after the Big Bang, when matter gathered briefly in clumps and burned by fusion light. ‘It was a bonfire, over almost as soon as it began. The universe was very young. It has swollen some ten thousand trillion times in size since then … Nevertheless, it was in that gaudy era that humans arose.
Us,
Anlic.’

She looked into her soul, seeking warm memories of the Afterglow. She found nothing.

She looked back at the gravity mine.

At its centre was a point of yellow-white light. Spears of light arced out from its poles, knife-thin. The spark was surrounded by a flattened cloud, dull red, inhomogeneous, clumpy. The big central light cast shadows through the crowded space around it.

It was beautiful, a sculpture of light and crimson smoke.

‘This is Mine One,’ Geador said gently. ‘The first mine of all. And it is built on the ruins of the primeval galaxy – the galaxy from which humans first emerged.’

‘The first galaxy?’

‘But it was all long ago.’ He moved closer to her. ‘So long ago that this mine became exhausted. Soon it will evaporate away completely. We have long since had to move on …’

But that had happened before. After all humans had started from a single star, and spilled over half the universe, even before the stars ceased to shine.

Now humans wielded energy, drawn from the great gravity mines, on a scale unimagined by their ancestors. Of course mines would be exhausted – like this one – but there would be other mines. Even when the last mine began to fail, they would think of
something.

The future stretched ahead, long, glorious. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across trillions upon trillions of years.

It was the Conflux.

Its source was far upstream.

The crudities of birth and death had been abandoned even before the Afterglow was over, when man’s biological origins were decisively shed. So every mind, every tributary that made up the Conflux today had its source in that bright, remote upstream time.

Nobody had been born since the Afterglow.