The Quagma Datum

A.D. 5611

The soup was cold. I pushed it away. "Tell me why I'm here."

Wyman didn't answer until the next course arrived. It was a rich coq au vin. He forked it into his mouth with an enthusiasm that told me he hadn't always been accustomed to such luxury. Earthlight caught the jewelry crusted over his fingers.

Faintly disgusted, I lifted my eyes to the bay window behind him. Now that we'd left the atmosphere the Elevator Restaurant was climbing its cable more steeply. The Sahel ground anchor site had turned into a brown handkerchief, lost in the blue sink of Earth.

Suddenly the roof turned clear. Starlight twinkled on the cutlery and the table talk ebbed to silence.

Wyman smiled at my reaction.

"Dr. Luce, you're a scientist. I asked you here to set you a scientific puzzle." His accent was stilted, a mask for his origins. "Did you read about the lithium-7 event? No? A nova-bright object fifteen billion light years away; it lasted about a year. The spectrum was dominated by one element. Doctor, the thing was a beacon of lithium-7."

A floating bottle of St. Emilion refilled my glass.

I thought about it. "Fifteen billion years is the age of the Universe. So this object went through its glory soon after the Big Bang."

Thin fingers played with coiffed hair. "So, Doctor, what's the significance of the lithium?"

"Lithium-7 is a relic of the early Universe. A few microseconds after the singularity the Universe was mostly quagma—a magma of free quarks. Then the quarks congealed into nuclear particles, which gathered into the first nuclei.

"Lithium-7 doesn't form in stars. It was formed at that moment of nucleosynthesis. So all this points to an early Universe event."

"Good," he said, as if I'd passed a test.

Our empty plates sank into the table.

"So what's this got to do with me? I hate to disappoint you, Wyman, but this isn't my field."

"Unified force theories," he said rapidly. "That's your field. At high enough energies the forces of physics combine into a single superforce. The principle of the old GUTdrive. Right? And the only time when such energy densities obtained naturally was right after the Big Bang. The superforce held together your quagma." He was a slight man, but the steadiness of his pale eyes made me turn aside. "So the early Universe is your field, after all. Dr Luce, don't try to catch me out. You think of me, no doubt dismissively, as an entrepreneur. But what I'm an entrepreneur of is human science. What's left of it... I've made myself a rich man. You shouldn't assume that makes me a fool."

I raised my glass. "Fair enough. So why do you think this lithium thing is so important?"

"Two reasons. First, creation physics. Here we have a precise location where we can be certain that something strange happened, mere moments after the singularity. Think what we could learn by studying it. A whole new realm of understanding... and think what an advantage such an understanding would prove to the first race to acquire it."

"And what profits could be made from it," I said dryly. "Right? And the second reason?"

"The Silver Ghosts think it's important. And what they're interested in, I'm interested in."

That made me cough on my wine. "How do you know what the Ghosts are up to?"

His grin was suddenly boyish. "I've got my contacts. And they tell me the Ghosts are sending a ship."

I choked again. "Across fifteen billion lights? I don't believe it."

"It's a fast ship."

"Yeah..." I thought it through further. "And how could such a ship report back?"

Wyman shrugged. "A quantum-inseparability link?"

"Wyman, the attenuation over such distances would reduce any data to mush."

"Maybe," he said cheerfully. "In conversational mode anyway. I hear the Ghosts are planning a high-intensity packet burst device. Would that get through?"

I shrugged. "Perhaps. You still haven't told me why you're talking to me."

Abruptly he leaned forward. "Because you've the expertise."

I flinched from his sudden intensity.

"You've no family. You're fit. And the youthful idealism that trapped you in research has long worn off—hasn't it?—now that your contemporaries are earning so much more in other fields. You need money, Doctor. I have it."

Then he sipped coffee.

"I've the expertise for what?" I whispered.

"I've got my own ship."

"But the Ghosts—"

He grinned again. "My ship's got a secret... a supersymmetry drive. The Susy drive is a human development. A new one, can you believe it? The Ghosts don't have it. So my ship's faster, and we'll beat them."

"For Lethe's sake, Wyman, I'm an academic. I've never even flown a kite."

A cheese board floated by; he cut himself precise slices. "The ship will fly itself. I want you to observe."

I felt as if I were falling. I tried to think it out. "...Tell me this, Wyman. Will there be any penalty clauses in my contract?"

He looked amused. "Such as?"

"For not getting there first."

"What's going to beat the Susy drive?"

"A Xeelee nightship."

Expressions chased across his face.

"All right, Doctor. I accept your point. The Xeelee are one of the parameters we have to work within. There'll be no penalty clauses."

Above my head the Restaurant's geostationary anchor congealed out of starlight into a mile-wide cuboid.

"Now the details," Wyman said. "I want you to make a stop on the way, at the home world of the Ghosts..."

Wyman's "ship" was a man-sized tin can.

It was stored in an open garage on the space-facing side of the Elevator Anchor. The thing's cylindrical symmetry was broken by strap-on packages: I recognized a compact hyperdrive and an intrasystem drive box. Set in one wall was a fist-sized fusion torus.

Wyman pointed out a black, suitcase-sized mass clinging to the pod's base. "The Susy drive," he said. "Neat, isn't it?"

I found half the hull would turn transparent. The interior of the pod was packed with instrument boxes, leaving precious little room for me.

I studied the pod with mild distaste. "Wyman, you expect me to cross the Universe... in this?"

He shrugged delicately. "Doctor, this is the best my private capital could fund. I've not had a cent of support from any human authority. Governments, universities, so-called research bodies... in the shadow of the Xeelee mankind is suffering a failure of imagination, Luce. We live in sorry times."

"Yeah."

"And that's why I've set up a meeting with the Ghosts on the way out. This flying coffin isn't much, but at least it demonstrates our intent. We're going for the prize. Perhaps it will persuade the Ghosts that we should pool our resources."

"Ah. So this pod is really a bargaining counter... you don't mean it to make the journey after all?" I felt a mixture of relief—and profound regret.

"Oh, no," Wyman said. "What I told you is true. I sincerely believe the Susy drive could beat the Ghosts to the prize. If necessary. But why not spread the risk?" He grinned, his teeth white in the gloom of his helmet.

I left a day later.

Our Universe is an eleven-dimensional object. All but four of those dimensions are compactified—rolled up to an unimaginable thinness. What we call hyperspace is one of those extra dimensions.

The hyperdrive module twisted me smoothly through ninety degrees and sent me skimming over the surface of the Universe like a pebble over a pond.

Of course, I felt nothing. Hyperspace travel is routine. With the pod's window opaqued, it was like riding an elevator. I was left with plenty of time to brood. When I checked the pod's external monitors I could see the Susy-space module clinging to the hull, dormant and mysterious.

After five days, with a soft impact, the pod dropped back into four-space.

I turned on my window. I was rotating slowly.

The sun of the Silver Ghosts is in the constellation of Sagittarius. Now it slid past my window, huge and pale. I could see stars through its smoky limb. Something came crawling close around that limb, a point of unbearable blue. It dragged a misty wave out of the sun.

I knew the story of the Ghosts. That blue thing was the main sun's twin. It was a pulsar; it sprayed gusts of heavy particles across the sky six hundred times a second. Over a billion years that unending particle torching had boiled away the main star's flesh.

The intrasystem drive cut in with a dull roar, a kick in the small of my back.

Then the planet of the Silver Ghosts floated into view.

I heard myself swearing under my breath. It was a world dipped in chrome, reflecting the Universe.

I was flying over a pool of stars. Towards the edge of the pool the stars crowded together, some smeared into twinkling arcs, and the blanched sun sprawled across one pole. As I descended my own image was like a second astronaut, drive blazing, rising from the pool to meet me.

Now I saw what looked like the skeleton of a moon, floating around the limb of the world. I directed monitors toward it. "Wyman. What do you make of that?"

Wyman's voice crackled out of the inseparability link. "That's where they built their ship to the lithium-7 event. They hollowed out their moon and used its mass to boost them on their way."

"Wyman... I hate to tell you this, but they've gone already."

"I know." He sounded smug. "Don't worry about it. I told you, we can beat them. If we need to."

I continued to fall. The pod began speaking to the Ghosts' landing control systems. At last the perfection of the planet congealed into graininess, and I fell amongst silvered clouds. The landscape under the clouds was dark: I passed like a firefly, lighting up cities and oceans.

Under the Ghosts' control I landed in a sweep, bumping.

I rested for a moment in the darkness. Then—

I heard music. The ground throbbed with a bass harmonization that made the pod walls sing. It was as if I could hear the heart of the frozen planet.

I lit an omnidirectional lamp.

Mercury droplets glistened on a black velvet landscape. I felt as if I were brooding over the lights of a tiny city. There were highlights on the horizon: I saw a forest of globes and half-globes anchored by cables. Necklaces swooped between the globes, frosted with frozen air...

When their sun decayed the only source of heat available to the Ghost biosphere was the planet's geothermal energy. So the Ghosts turned themselves and their fellow creatures into compact, silvered spheres, each body barely begrudging an erg to the cold outside.

Finally clouds of mirrored life-forms rolled upwards. The treacherous sky was locked out... but every stray photon of the planet's internal heat was trapped.

"I don't get it, Michael," Wyman said. "If they're so short of heat why aren't they all jet-black?"

"Because perfect absorbers of heat are perfect emitters as well," I said. "High school physics, Wyman. While perfect reflectors are also the best heat containers. See?"

"...Yeah. I think so."

"And anyway, who cares about the why of it? Wyman, it's... beautiful."

"I think you've got a visitor."

A five-foot bauble had separated from the forest and now came flying over the sequined field. In its mirrored epidermis I could see my own spectral face. Taped to that hide was a standard translator box. A similar box was fixed to the pod floor; now it crackled to life. "You are Dr. Michael Luce. I understand you represent a Wyman, of Earth. You are welcome here," said the Silver Ghost. "I work with the Sink Ambassador's office."

"The Sink?" I whispered.

"The Heat Sink, Luce. The sky. I am Wyman. Thank you for meeting us. Do you know what I wish to discuss?"

"Of course. Our respective expeditions to the lithium site." The truncated spheroid bobbed, as if amused. "We can make an educated guess about what you seek to achieve here, Mr. Wyman. What we do not know yet is the price you'll ask."

Wyman laughed respectfully.

I felt bewildered. "Sorry to butt in," I said, "but what are you talking about? We're here to discuss a pooling of resources. Aren't we? So that humans and Ghosts end up sharing—"

The Ghost interrupted gently. "Dr. Luce, your employer is hoping that we will offer to buy him out. You see, Wyman's motivation is the exploitation of human technology for personal profit. If he proceeds with your expedition he has the chance of unknown profit at high risk. However, a sell-out now would give him a fat profit at no further risk."

Wyman said nothing.

"But," I said, "a sell-out would give the Ghosts exclusive access to the lithium knowledge. All that creation science you told me about, Wyman... I mean no offense," I said to the Ghost, "but this seems a betrayal of our race."

"I doubt that is a factor in his calculation, Doctor," said the Ghost.

I laughed dryly. "Sounds like they know you too well, Wyman."

"So what's your answer?" Wyman growled.

"I'm afraid you have nothing to sell, Mr. Wyman. Our vessel will arrive at the lithium-7 site in..." A hiss from the translator box. "Fourteen standard days."

"See this ship? It will be there in ten."

The Ghost was swelling and subsiding; highlights moved hypnotically over its flesh. "Powered by your supersymmetry drive. We are not excited by the possibility that it will work—"

"How can you say that?" I snapped, my pride obscurely wounded. "Have you investigated it?"

"We have no need to, Doctor. Our ship has a drive based on Xeelee principles. Hence it will work."

"Oh, I see. If the Xeelee haven't discovered something, it's not there to be discovered. Right? Well, at least this shows mankind isn't alone in suffering a fracture of the imagination, Wyman."

The Ghost, softly breathing vacuum, said nothing.

"We humans aren't so complacent," snapped Wyman. "The Xeelee aren't omnipotent. That's why we'll have the edge over the likes of you in the end."

"A convincing display of patriotism," said the Ghost smoothly.

"Yeah, that's a bit rich, Wyman."

"You're so damn holy, Luce. Let me tell you, the Ghost's right. This trip is risky. It's stretched me. Unless you come up with the goods I might have trouble paying your fee. Chew on that, holy man."

"Dr. Luce, I urge you not to throw away your life on this venture." The Ghost's calm was terrifying.

There was a moment of silence. Suddenly this world of mirrors seemed a large and strange place, and my own troubled eyes stared out of the Ghost's hide.

"Come on, Luce," said Wyman. "We've finished our business. Let's waste no more time here."

My drive splashed light over the chrome-plated landscape. I kept my eyes on the Ghost until it was lost in a blanket of sparkles.

I soared out of the gravity well of the Ghost world.

"Strap in."

"Disappointed, Wyman?"

"Shut up and do as I say."

The drive cut out smoothly, leaving me weightless. The control screens flickered as they reconfigured. Thumps and bangs rattled the hull; I watched my intrasystem and hyperdrive packs drift away, straps dangling.

The pod was metamorphosing around me.

I locked myself into a webbing of elasticated straps, fumbling at buckles with shaking fingers. There was a taste of copper in my throat.

"Do you understand what's happening?" Wyman demanded. "I'm stripping down the pod. Every surplus ounce will cost me time."

"Just get on with it."

Panels blew out from the black casing fixed to the base of the pod; a monitor showed me the jeweled guts of the Susy drive.

"Now, listen, Luce. You know the conversational inseparability link will cut out as soon as you go into Susy-space. But I'll be—with you in spirit."

"How cheering."

The pod shuddered once—twice—and the stars blurred.

"It's time," Wyman said. "Godspeed, Michael—"

The antique expression surprised me.

Something slammed into the base of the pod; I dangled in my webbing. For as long as I could I kept my eyes fixed on the Ghost world.

I lit up a hemisphere.

Then the planet crumpled like tissue paper, and the stars turned to streaks and disappeared.

Wyman had boasted about his Susy drive. "Hyperspace travel is just a slip sideways into one of the Universe's squashed-up extra dimensions. Whereas with supersymmetry you're getting into the real guts of physics..."

There are two types of particles: fermions, the building blocks of matter, like quarks and electrons, and force carriers, like photons. Supersymmetry tells us that each building block can be translated into a force carrier, and vice versa.

"The supersymmetric twins, the s-particles, are no doubt inherently fascinating," said Wyman. "But for the businessman the magic comes when you do two supersymmetric transformations—say, electron to selectron and back again. You end up with an electron, of course—but an electron in a different place..."

And so Wyman hoped to have me leapfrog through Susy-space to the lithium-7 object. What he wasn't so keen to explain was what it would feel like.

Susy-space is another Universe, laid over our own. It has its own laws. I was transformed into a supersymmetric copy of myself. I was an s-ghost in Susy-space. And it was... different.

Things are blurred in Susy-space. The distinction between me, here, and the stars, out there, wasn't nearly as sharp as it is in four-space.

Can you understand that?

Susy-space is not a place designed for humans. Man is a small, warm creature, accustomed to the skull's dark cave.

Susy-space cut through all that.

I was exposed. I could feel the scale of the journey, as if the arch of the Universe were part of my own being. Distance crushed me. Earth and its cozy Sun were a childhood memory, lost in the grief of curved space.

Eyes streaming, I opaqued the window.

I slept for a while. When I woke, things hadn't got any better.

Trying to ignore the oppressive aura of Susy-space I played with the new monitor configurations, looking for the Susy-drive controls. It took me two hours of growing confusion to work out that there weren't any.

The Susy drive had been discarded after pushing me on my way, like a throwaway rocket in the earliest human flights.

I could see the logic of it. Why carry excess baggage?

There were two problems.

The trip was one way. And Wyman hadn't told me.

I'm not a strong man; I don't pretend to be. It took some time to work through my first reaction.

Then I washed my face and sipped a globe of coffee.

The translator box lit up. "Luce. What's your status?"

I crushed the globe; cooling coffee spurted over my wrist. "Wyman, you bastard. You've hijacked me... And I thought the inseparability link wouldn't work over these distances."

"We have a packet link; but apart from that, it doesn't. This isn't Wyman. I'm a Virtual representation stored in the translator box. I should think you're pleased to hear my voice. You need the illusion of company, you see. It's all quite practical. And this is a historic trip. I wanted some small part of me to be out there with you..."

I breathed hard, trying to control my voice. "Why didn't you tell me this trip was no return?"

"Because you wouldn't have gone," said the Wyman Virtual—mentally I started calling him "sWyman."

"Of course not. No matter what the fee.—And what about my fee? Have you paid it over yet?"

sWyman hesitated. "I'd be happy to, Michael. But... do you have an estate? Dependents?"

"You know I don't. Damn you."

"Look, Michael, I'm sorry if you feel tricked. But I had to make sure you'd take the trip. We have to put the interests of the race first, don't we?..."

After that my courage began to fail once more. sWyman had the decency to shut up.

We popped out of Susy-space, sparkling with selectrons and neutralinos.

My time in that metal box had seemed a lot longer than ten days. I don't remember a lot of it. I'd been locked inside my head, looking for a place to hide from the oppression of distance, from the burden of looming death.

Now I breathed deeply; even the canned air of the pod seemed sweet out of Susy-space.

I checked my status. I'd have four days' life support at the lithium-7 site. It would expire—with me—just when the Ghosts arrived. Wyman had given me the bare bones.

I de-opaqued my window and looked out. I was spinning lazily in an ordinary sky. There was a powdering of stars, a pale band that marked a galactic plane, smudges that were distant galaxies.

Earth was impossibly far away, somewhere over the horizon of the Universe. I shivered. Damn it, this place felt old.

There was something odd about one patch of sky. It looked the size of a dinner plate at arm's length. There were no stars in the patch. And it was growing slowly.

I set up the monitors. "sWyman—what is it?"

"All I see is a dull infra-red glow... But that's where the lithium object is hiding, so that's the way we're headed."

The patch grew until it hid half the sky.

I started to make out a speckled effect. The speckles spread apart; it was as if we were falling into a swarm of bees. Soon we reached the outskirts of the swarm. A hail of huge objects shot past us and began to hide the stars behind us—

"They're ships."

"What?"

I straightened up from my monitor. "Ships. Millions of ships, sWyman."

I swung the focus around the sky. I picked out a little family of cylinders, tumbling over each other like baby mice. There was a crumpled sphere not much bigger than the pod; it orbited a treelike structure of branches and sparkling leaves. Beyond that I made out bundles of spheroids and tetrahedra, pencils of rods and wands—my gaze roved over a speckling of shape and color.

I was at the heart of a hailstorm of ships. They filled the sky, misting into the distance.

But there was no life, no purposeful movement. It was a desolate place; I felt utterly alone.

I looked again at the tree-thing. The delicate ship was miles wide. But there were scorch marks on the leaves, and holes in the foliage bigger than cities.

"sWyman, these are wrecks. All of them."

A motion at the edge of my vision. I tried to track it. A black, birdlike shape that seemed familiar—

"Luce, why the junk yard? What's happened here?"

I thought of a shell of lithium-stained light growing out of this place and blossoming around the curve of the Universe. At its touch flocks of ships would rise like birds from the stars... "sWyman, we're maybe the first to travel here from our Galaxy. But races from further in, closer to this event, have been flooding here from the start. As soon as the lithium-7 light reached them they would come here, to this unique place, hoping as we hope to find new understanding. They've been seeking the lithium treasure for billions of years... and dying here. Let's hope there's still something worth dying for."

Something was growing out of the speckled mist ahead. It was a flattened sphere of blood-colored haze; starlight twinkled through its substance.

It was impossible to guess its scale. And it kept growing.

"sWyman. I think that's another ship. It may not be solid... but I know we're going to hit. Where's my intrasystem drive?"

"Fifteen billion light years away."

There was detail in the crimson fog, sparks that chattered around rectangular paths. Now the huge ship shut off half the sky.

"Lethe." I opaqued the window.

There was a soft resistance, like a fall into a liquid. Red light played through the pod walls as if they were paper. Sparks jerked through right angles in the air.

Then it was over. I tried to steady my breath.

"Why worry, Michael?" sWyman said gently. "We've no power; we're ballistic. If another of those babies runs into us there's not a damn thing we can do about it."

"It's getting clearer up ahead."

We dropped out of the mist of ships and shot into a hollow space the size of the Solar System. On the far side was another wall of processed matter—more ships, I found. There was a sphere of smashed-up craft clustering around this place like gaudy moths.

And the flame at the heart of it all?

Nothing much. Only a star. But very, very old...

Once it had been a hundred times the mass of our sun. It had squirted lithium-7 light over the roof of the young cosmos. It had a terrific time. But the good days passed quickly. What we saw before us was a dried-up corpse, showing only by its gravity signature.

Just an old star... with something in orbit around it.

I focused my instruments. "That thing's about a foot across," I recorded. "But it masses more than Jupiter..."

The monstrous thing crawled past the surface of its wizened mother, raising a blood-red tide.

"So what? A black hole?"

I shook my head. "The densities are wrong. This is a different ball game, sWyman. That stuff's quagma."

The largest piece of quagma I'd had to work with before had been smaller than a proton. This was my field, brought within miraculous reach. I stammered observations—

Things started to happen.

The quagma thing veered out of orbit and shot towards us. I watched in disbelief. "It's not supposed to do that."

I felt a tingle as it hurtled past, mere yards from my window. It looked like a lump of cooling charcoal. Its gravity field slapped the pod as if it were a spinning top, and centripetal force threw me against the wall.

Clinging to the window frame I caught a glimpse of the quagma object whirling away from the pod and neatly returning to its orbit.

Then a shadow fell across the window.

"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.

I saw the flash through closed eyelids.

I tumbled backwards. The pain in my chest passed into a dull acceptance. Those Ghosts would have to move fast.

A cold smoothness closed around me.

There was light behind my eyes. I opened them to an airy room. A window to my left. Blue sky. The smell of flowers. A nurse's concerned face over me.

A human nurse.

Behind him, a Ghost hovered.

I tried to speak. "Hello, Wyman."

A footstep. "How did you know I was here?" His pinched expression made me smile.

"You're looking a lot older, Wyman, you know that?" My voice was a croak. "Of course you're here. You've been waiting for me to die. But here I am, ready to collect my fee.

"I expect the doctors will spend the next year scanning me on all wavelengths, mapping out the quagma scars and working out what they mean. I'll be famous." I laughed; my chest hurt. "But we're going to get the treasure, Wyman. A message from another realm of creation.

"Of course we'll have to share it. Humans and Ghosts... but at least we'll get it.

"And you'll have to share the profits, won't you? And there's my fee as well. You didn't budget for that, did you, Wyman? I'd guess you're about to become a lot poorer—"

He walked out, slamming the door.

"But," I whispered, "we must put the interests of the race first."

There was a bit of blue sky reflected in the Ghost. I stared at it and waited for sleep to return.

The burst of human inventiveness characterized by the prototype Susy drive was not sustained. As Wyman foresaw, it was simply too easy for human beings to steal what others had already discovered, rather than develop their own.

The Susy drive—unstable, expensive, unproven—was abandoned.

New images formed before my eyes.

Suddenly I was looking at my own face.

"Jack, every life has a part, in the great cosmic drama we are forced to act out. Watch, now..."