Eve A.D. 5664 The Ghost cruiser hovered between Earth and Moon. The ship was a rough ovoid, woven from silvered rope. Instrument clusters and energy pods were knotted to the walls. Around me, Ghosts clung to the rope like grapes to a vine. The blue of crescent Earth shimmered over their pulsating, convex surfaces. Earth folded up and disappeared. The first hyperspace hop was immense, thousands of light years long. Then, in a succession of bewildering leaps, we sailed out of the Galaxy. We fell obliquely to the plane of the disc. The core was a chandelier of pink-white light, thousands of light years across, hanging over my head. Spiral arms—cloudy, streaming—moved serenely above me. There were blisters of gas sprinkled along the arms, I saw, bubbles of swollen colour. Galactic light glimmered over the silvered flesh of the Ghosts, and of my own body. We reached the Ghosts' base—far from home, in the halo of the Galaxy. It was a typical Ghost construct: a hollowed-out moon, a rock ball a thousand miles wide, and it was riddled with passages and cavities. It hung beneath the great ceiling of the Galaxy, the only large object visible as other than a smudge of light. We descended. The moon turned into a complex, machined landscape below me. Our ship shut down its drive and entered a high, looping orbit. The Ghosts drifted away from the ship and down towards the surface, bobbing like balloons, shining in Galaxy light. I let go of the ship and floated away from its tangled hull. Ghost ships and science platforms swept over the pocked landscape, fragments of shining net. All over the surface, vast cylindrical structures gleamed. These were intrasystem drives and hyperdrives, systems which had been used to haul this moon—at huge expense—out of the plane of the Galaxy, and to hold it here. There was quagma down there, I saw, little packets of the primordial stuff, buried in the pits of ancient planetesimal craters. My information had been good, then. What in Lethe were the Ghosts doing out here? The world of the Silver Ghosts was once earthlike: blue skies, a yellow sun. As the Ghosts climbed to awareness their sun evaporated, killed by a companion pulsar. When the atmosphere started snowing, the Ghosts rebuilt themselves. That epochal ordeal left the Ghosts determined, secretive, often reckless. Dangerous. They moved out into space—the Heat Sink—to fulfill their ambitions. I had been told the Ghosts were close to completing their new quagma project. I was chief administrator of the Ghost liaison office, representing most of mankind. It was my job to stop the Ghosts endangering us all. So that I could deal with the Ghosts, I was remade, a decade ago. I look like a statue of a man, done in silver, or chrome. My legs are pillars. My hands and arms have been made immensely strong. I don't live behind my eyes anymore: I live in my chest cavity. I feel like a deep-sea fish, blind and almost immobile, stuck here in the dark. My mechanical eyes are like periscopes, far above "me." I can subsist on starlight, and survive the vacuum for days at a time, enfolding my seventy-six-year-old human core—me—in warmth and darkness. I have a Ghost doctor; twice a year it opens me up and cleans me out. I have a face, a sculpture of eyes, nose, mouth. It doesn't even look much like I used to, before. It doesn't matter; apart from the eyes, the face is non-functional, put there to reassure me. I can run with the Ghosts. I can fly in space, if I choose to. I don't, much. When I'm not dealing with the Ghosts I spend most of my time in Virtual environments. So my physical form doesn't matter much. In fact, lately I've come to wish the Ghosts had just rebuilt me as a sphere, as they are: simple, classical, efficient. A Ghost came soaring up to me. It was a silvery, five-feet-wide globe, complex patterns shimmering over its surface. I recognized it from its electromagnetic signature: contrary to myth, Ghosts aren't all alike, at least not to another Ghost. I greeted it. "Sink Ambassador." The Ambassador to the Heat Sink floated before me, shimmering; I could see my own distorted reflection in its hide. "Jack Raoul. It has been many years—" "More than a decade." "It is pleasant to meet with you. Even if your journey has been a wasted one." So it began: the endless diplomatic dance. I've known the Ambassador, on and off, for a long time, and we have a certain—friendship, I guess you'd call it. But none of that is ever allowed to interfere with species imperatives. "I presume you want to get straight down to business, Sink Ambassador? It's clear—I can see—that you're running fresh quagma experiments down there, on that moon. What are you up to now?" "We have no need to justify our actions. You have no authority over our activities." "Oh, yes, we do. By force of treaty we have the right of inspection of any quagma-related project you run. You know that very well. Just as you have reciprocal rights over us." It was true. The study of primordial quagma—relics of the Big Bang—has proven immensely dangerous. Even to the extent of drawing the attention of the Xeelee. Humanity—and the Silver Ghosts, and a host of other spacefaring species—have grown accustomed to the aloof gaze of the Xeelee, and their occasional devastating intervention in our affairs. For example, fifty years ago the Xeelee disrupted the Ghost and human expeditions which crossed the Universe in search of a fragment of quagma. Some believe that by such interventions the Xeelee are maintaining their monopoly on power, which holds sway across the observable Universe. Others say that, like the vengeful gods of man's childhood, the Xeelee are protecting us from ourselves. Either way, it's insulting. Claustrophobic. In my time with them I've developed a hunch that the Ghosts feel pretty much the same. Which makes them even more dangerous. Four decades after those first expeditions, we'd turned up evidence that the Ghosts were performing experiments with quagma, in violation of treaties between our races. I was sent to see. The lead turned out to be accurate. The Ghosts' dangerous project was unfolding in the heart of a red giant star—concealing their work from the Xeelee, and, incidentally, from us. The disastrous outcome of that project all but destroyed us. After that, human surveillance of Ghost quagma projects was stepped up. And now it seemed that the Ghosts were at it again. The Sink Ambassador said, "You do not understand, Jack Raoul." "Oh, don't I?" "This is a new program, of great significance. We have every right to progress it, unhindered. Now." It suddenly turned hospitable. "You have traveled a long way. Your doctor is on hand. Perhaps you wish to rest, before returning to the plane of the Galaxy—" I approached it, holding my arms out wide, my silvered hands raised like weapons. I hoped that the Ghosts—the Sink Ambassador at any rate—had studied humans sufficiently to get something out of my body language. "Sink Ambassador, we're not going to let this go. We have to know what you're doing, out here." I pushed my sculptured face so close to its silvery hide I could see my own distorted reflection. "After last time, we're quite prepared to use force." It seemed to stiffen; I tried to read the thin tones of the translator chips. "Is this some formal declaration of—" "Not at all," I said. "Our communications are secure, right now. This is just you, and me, out here in the halo of the Galaxy. I simply want you to understand the whole picture, Sink Ambassador." It hovered in space for a long time, complex standing waves shimmering across its surface. Then: "Very well. Jack Raoul—what do you know of dark matter?" Dark matter: a shadow Universe which permeates, barely touching, the visible worlds we inhabit... And yet that image was misleading, for the dark matter is no shadow; it comprises fully nine-tenths of the Universe's total mass. The glowing, baryonic matter which makes up stars, planets, humans, is a mere glittering froth on the surface of that dark ocean. I let the Ambassador download data into me. In my enhanced vision, huge Virtual schematics overlaid the Galaxy's majestic disc. "Dark matter cannot form stars," the Sink Ambassador said. "As a result, much larger clouds—larger than galaxies—are the equilibrium form for dark matter. The Universe is populated by immense, cold, bland clouds of dark matter: it is a spectral cosmos, almost without structure." "This is no doubt fascinating, Sink Ambassador, but I don't see—" "Jack Raoul, we believe we have found a way to construct soliton stars: stellar-mass objects, of dark matter. Such is the purpose of the experiment, conducted here. We will build the first dark matter stars, the first in the Universe's history." I pondered that. It was a typically grandiose Ghost scheme. But—what was its true goal? And why all the secrecy, from the Xeelee and from us? I knew there must be layers of truth, hidden beneath the surface of what the Ambassador had told me, just as their nuggets of quagma had been inexpertly hidden beneath the regolith of their hollowed-out moon. "...Maybe I can answer your questions, Jack." From the glands stored within my silver hide, adrenaline pumped into my system. I turned. "Eve." My dead wife smiled at me. The Sink Ambassador receded, turning to a tiny point of light. The Galaxy shimmered like a Ghost's hide, dimming. Then all the stars went out. I looked down at myself. I was human again. Once we'd owned an apartment at the heart of the New Bronx. It was a nice place, light and roomy, with state-of-the-art Virtual walls. Since my metamorphosis, I can't use it anymore, but I keep it anyhow, leaving it unoccupied. Unchanged, in fact, since Eve's death. I just like to know it's there. Now I was back in that apartment. I was alone. I went to the drinks cabinet, poured myself a malt, and waited. I can still drink, of course, but I've discovered that much of the pleasure of liquor comes from the tactile sensations of the bottle clinking against the glass, the heavy mass of the liquor in the base of the glass, the first rush of flavor. Being injected just isn't the same. I savoured my malt. It was terrific. There was more processing power behind this simulation, whatever it was, than any I'd encountered before— One wall melted. Eve was sitting on a couch like mine. She smiled at me again. "You have a lot of questions," she said. I sipped my drink. "Will you join me?" She shook her head. She looked older than when she'd died. She pulled at a lock of hair, a habit she'd had since she was a child. I said, "This is a Virtual simulation, right?" "In a sense." "You're not Eve. If you were, you wouldn't even be here." Even the Virtual copy of Eve would have cared too much to do this to me, to plunge me back into this self-regarding mess. Despite my loneliness after the metamorphosis, I hadn't called up Eve in seven, eight years. "Jack, I'm a better image than any you've seen before. Richer. Indistinguishable from—" "No. I can distinguish." She said, "You must understand what the Ghosts are doing here. And why you must allow them to proceed." "Oh, must I? And you're here to persuade me, right?" She stepped up to the surface of the Virtual wall which separated us. After a moment, I put down my drink and approached her. She stepped out of the wall. I could feel her warmth, the feather of her breath on my face. My heart was pounding, somewhere, in a hollow metal chest cavity. ...But even as I stared at Eve, I was figuring how much processing power this Virtual must be demanding. This creature with me wasn't Eve, and it sure wasn't the cosy untouchable Virtual representation my apartment used to call up. How were the Ghosts doing this? She held out her hand. I reached out, and my fingers passed through her arm; her flesh, crumbling into cuboid pixels, had the texture of dead leaves. "I'm sorry." She pushed back her hair. She reached out to me again. This time, when her fingers settled in mine, they were warm and soft; her hand was like a bird, living and responsive. "Oh, Eve." I couldn't help myself. "Jack, you must understand." Behind her, the wall turned black. Eve's hand was still warm in mine. "You must watch," she told me, "and learn. It is a long story..." There was a patch of light, diffuse, in the center of the wall. It resolved into the blue Earth. Ships swam around it, on sparks of light. C.A.D. 500,000,000 Time passed. After a certain point measurement of time became meaningless. For Paul this point arrived when there was no hydrogen left to burn anywhere, and the last star flickered and died. Already the Universe was a hundred times its age when the Xeelee left. Somberly Paul watched the dimmed galaxies subside like the chests of old men. At last there was little free baryonic matter outside the vast black holes which gathered in the cores of galaxies. Then, as the long night of the cosmos deepened, even protons collapsed, and the remaining star-corpses began to evaporate. Paul wearied of puzzling over the huge, slow projects of the photino birds. He sought out what had once been a neutron star. The carbon-coated sphere floating between the huge black holes was so dense that proton decay was actually warming it, keeping it a few degrees above the near-absolute zero of its surroundings; Paul, as if seeking comfort, clustered his attention foci close to this shadow of baryonic glory. After some time he became aware that he was not alone: the last of the Qax had come sliding through the interstices of space and now hovered with him over the frigid surface of the star. Human and Qax, huddled around the chill proton star, did not attempt to communicate. There was nothing more to say. The river of time flowed, unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity. Epilogue EVE Eve was receding from me. I saw her face, as if it was turned up towards me, and I was rising, away from her. The walls, the apartment, had disappeared. There was only Eve's face, and darkness. "You must remember what you have seen, Jack. You must understand. You can see now why the Ghosts' project must go ahead. Can't you? Can't you, Jack?" I shouted at her: "Tell me who you are, damn you. Tell me how you know all this, the future. Tell me!" But my voice was a whisper, an insect-rustle; and she didn't reply. Her face faded, as if a light had been turned off. And the Galaxy came out, crystallizing above me like a gaudy frost. A Ghost hovered before me, concern sending ripples across its skin. "Jack Raoul. Can you hear me?" I looked down. My hands were chrome, shimmering, returning complex highlights from the Galaxy's glow. "Oh, Lethe. I'm back." "Jack Raoul? You have been unresponsive to stimuli for some time—" I wanted to punch a hole in the Ambassador's complacent hide, and then retreat into the safe warmth of my own metal stomach. "What have you done to me? What right have you—what right..." Slowly, I became aware that all around me the Ghosts were rising, clustering around their skeletal ships, and sailing away from the deformed moon. I tried to think beyond my own concerns. "Ambassador. What's going on?" "Jack Raoul, it seems you have, after all, achieved your purpose. You have come here to observe our experiment. Now, you are ready to witness its climax, its magnificent conclusion." I heard pride in those thin translated tones, saw an insufferable arrogance about the Ambassador's sleek shimmer. I looked down at the moon. The intrasystem pods were active, working symmetrically around its battered surface, holding the moon in place. And, down through the splayed-opened hearts of ancient craters, the quagma pods were descending towards the core. With the Ambassador, I fell away from the Galaxy, descending beneath the moon. The sky was empty of stars. The Galaxy was a mottled, glowing ceiling above us, and beneath my feet there was only the distant, etiolated smudge of remote galaxies. I looked at it all with new eyes. Those shining stars were already infected by the photino birds. Even the most remote galaxy I saw would be affected by the final conflict, between the birds and the doomed Xeelee. Behind the bright light of the Universe, I had glimpsed the skulllike dismalness of the end of time. The Ghosts and their ships had gathered into a rough sphere, a couple of thousand miles from the moon's surface; the moon hovered above me, a fat, battered orange, made three-dimensional by the subtle shading of Galaxy-core light. The Sink Ambassador said, "The climax is approaching." I sensed excitement in the complex patterns which shivered across its surface. "Tell me how you can make a star of dark matter." "Jack Raoul, there are ways to generate compact, self-gravitating solitonlike equilibrium states of bosonic fields. Here we are seeking an oscillating solution, known as an oscillation, which—" "Lethe," I said. "I wish Eve was here." "Your wife." "The real Eve. She was the only one who could make sense of all this stuff for me." The Ghost said nothing. "Keep talking," I said. The Ambassador, tried again, in language only slightly less technical, and my internal stores began to feed back trickles of interpretation to me, integrating what the Ghost was saying with the best human models. Gradually, I began to figure out what the Ghosts were trying to do. Dark matter can't form stars, because it can't cool down fast enough. When a clump of baryonic gas—normal matter—collapses under gravity, electromagnetic radiation carries away much of the heat produced. It is as if the radiation cools the gas cloud. The residual heat left in the cloud eventually balances the gravitational attraction, and equilibrium is found: a star has formed, a compact, stable body, with internal radiation pressure balancing out the tendency to collapse through gravitation. But dark matter doesn't produce electromagnetic radiation. And without the cooling effect of radiation, a dark matter cloud, collapsing under gravity, traps much more of its heat of contraction. So large, diffuse clouds are the equilibrium form for dark matter. "But," I said drily, "you've found a way around that." The Sink Ambassador spun complacently. "We are going to use another way to cool a clump of dark matter: gravitational cooling." I imagined a swarm of photinos, orbiting each other. The swarm could eject its own faster-moving members, sling-shotting them out like miniature spacecraft around shadowy planets. Because kinetic energy was equivalent to heat, the clump left behind would be cooler, more compact. "The mechanism is similar to what you know as the Lynden-Bell analysis of the Jeans instability," the Ghost said. "The mechanism whereby a star cluster can settle to a compact, stable equilibrium by collisionless relaxation: ejecting its own faster-moving components to an outer halo—" "Enough. So you're going to use gravitational cooling to form a dark matter star, right here." "The quagma pods will impact in the core of the moon, in a complex manner. They will be induced to decay and coalesce; their stores of superforce energy will be released in shaped pulses. The resulting gravitational waveforms will initiate the process. A photino cloud of approximately the mass of a small planet will begin to coalesce. Some thirteen percent of the cloud's mass will be ejected during the violent relaxation process. The final soliton star will be just a few feet across, at the heart of this moon. A complex massive Klein-Gordon scalar field will be produced, with no self-interaction save through gravity, which..." I tuned him out. I fed all this into my Notebooks. "Why here?" The Ghost spun, bobbing in space. "There is much dark matter, here in the galactic halo. And few Xeelee." "And few humans, right?" "I would be interested to know of the source of your information on the project, which—" "It's going to take some close control," I said. "The crucial events will last just microseconds: that complex sequence of quagma collisions in the core... Ambassador, you must have one giant AI controller built into that moon." It said nothing to that, and a grain of suspicion lodged in my mind. But I had other issues to pursue. "Tell me why you're doing this, Sink Ambassador. If you make a soliton star—so what? What will you have achieved?" It rolled, as if it was turning to face me. "You know as much as we do, now, about the fundamental truths of the Universe," it said. "The secret history of the cosmos: the epochal conflict between light and dark matter, whose effects we have only begun to discern. "To sustain their existence, the creatures of photino matter need stable baryonic star cores. And therefore they are accelerating the evolution of the stars." It rolled in space. "Even now," the Ambassador said, "photino creatures are clustered in the hearts of those hundred billion stars, choking them. Even the original star of mankind, called Sol." "But they face resistance." "Yes. From the baryonic life forms whose habitats they are destroying. But even the Xeelee, immeasurably stronger than my race or yours, will be defeated." I knew that was true, from the glimpses Eve had vouchsafed me. "And so—" "And so," the Ambassador said, "we are striving to generate another option. A better way." It wheeled over the shaped moon. "Raoul, the quagma pods are merging in the moon's core. It begins..." I started to understand. "You think that if you can show the photino birds how to build star-sized objects of dark matter—without using the cores of baryonic stars—they will stop destroying the stars." "That is the goal. The dream, if you will." "And the great Xeelee war can stop, and we'll all coexist; we'll live together, photino birds and Xeelee and humans and Ghosts, like one huge family." I felt like laughing at it. "Lethe, Ambassador. At least you Ghosts can't be faulted for thinking big." "Now," it said, "you must understand why your opposition to this project must be withdrawn. On the success of this experiment, the future of the cosmos could hinge." I looked up at the engineered moon. There was a sense of mistiness about it, as if a great liquid lens had gathered over that pulverized surface; the light of the Galaxy was refracted, shimmering and softened. I stared into the dark matter mist, hunting for structure. "It is working," the Ghost said. "The photinos are coalescing. Soon, the equilibrium oscillations will be induced..." A trickle of data started whispering in my head. Interpolations and feedback from my datastores, Eve's Notebooks. Shadowy Virtuals glimmered around me: schematics of the moon, the photino star the Ghosts were building, little charts of growth rates, density-time fluctuations. There was something odd. The projections of the soliton star's formation—based on human mathematics—didn't match up with what the Ghost had told me... But I was still preoccupied with my hardening suspicions. I thought about prophecy. Humans had built Michael Poole's wormhole, and benefited from the fragments of data it had delivered: data from the ends of time. Perhaps the Ghosts, and other races, had achieved similar glimpses of the future. But all such glimpses are fragmentary and incomplete. Prophecy is possible using scientific laws, where sufficiently simple events are concerned: the eclipse of a sun, or the return of a long-period comet. And prophecy based in the more complex human arena has been used, after a fashion, for most of humanity's recorded history. My Notebooks told me about actuarial tables, devices for predicting death rates, that even predated human spaceflight. The more computing power is available, the more detailed a prophecy is possible. To spin out a future vision as detailed and granular as the one I'd been vouchsafed by Eve must have required computing power an order of magnitude more powerful than anything available to humanity. Or to the Ghosts. All at once the Ghosts were rich in processing power. Suddenly, I saw it. "You let it out," I accused the Ambassador. "Jack Raoul—" "You let it out. The Planck Zero AI. You released it." "It proved possible to accelerate the production of Hawking radiation, the natural evaporation of the black hole within which the AI was contained, which—" "Lethe. That AI was insane. You Ghosts may have destroyed us all. Ambassador, I'm going to file a full report about this. I'm going to get this operation shut down, and have human monitors placed in every Ghost research establishment from now on." "The AI is a powerful resource. Jack Raoul, we face cosmic obliteration. Even the Xeelee cannot shelter us. Surely the risk was justified. And as to the project, it is too advanced for—" I was aware of agitation among the flock of watching Ghosts. They started withdrawing further from the moon. An internal warning started to sound in my head. The Notebooks had come up with something they didn't like. More Virtual schematics, primary-color projections, started filling up my vision. The vents dug into the moon had started to glow, dull red. I saw molten rock bubble at the edge of one pit, its lip slumping into the cylindrical tunnel below. It was as if a fire burned in the moon's core; light poured out into space, illuminating the construction debris which clustered around the moon, and glimmering off the hides of the watching Ghosts, turning them to beads of fire. In the moon's surrounding veil of dark matter mist, I saw shadowy shapes hurtle, agitated, birdlike. ...And Eve was beside me now. She was Ghost-transformed as I was, her long-boned face easily recognizable under the chrome. She watched the metamorphosing moon, its fiery glow reflecting from her silvered eyes. The Sink Ambassador twisted in alarm, its hide glowing red, chattering on many frequencies to its fellows. "It isn't stable. The photino star. Is it, Eve?" "No," she said dreamily, not taking her eyes off the moon. "The density of photinos is too high." "Yes." That fit with what Eve's Notebooks were telling me. "The high density at the core is stimulating photino decay. The free Klein-Gordon field the Ghosts want to create is collapsing. Imploding—" Abruptly the Ghosts fled, including the Sink Ambassador, abandoning us; I saw their receding ships, shining threads against the intergalactic darkness. The surface of the moon was almost entirely molten now. It was subsiding, collapsing inwards. "The Ghosts thought they were creating a home for the photino birds," I said. "But they were wrong. You knew that. They have made—" "A bomb," she said. "A dark matter bomb." "It's you, isn't it? The Planck Zero AI. Behind the mask of my wife—" She pressed her face against my metallic chest. My anger was gone. Only pity remained. I embraced Eve, enfolding her within my arms. Her skin felt warm—impossibly so—human. "But this will destroy you," I said. "Whatever it is that sustains you, is in that moon." She turned to me, silver eyes empty, and smiled. I saw that she wore my ring on her finger. The thing at the heart of the moon turned white, dimming the sickly glow of the Galaxy's core. The moon blew apart. Molten rock, quivering droplets of it, showered up past us, patterning against my skin. I closed my mechanical eyes and huddled with Eve, waiting for the rocky storm to pass. Eve—the Planck Zero AI—wasn't destroyed. It proved possible to reconstruct some of it from the records and fragmented datastores left behind. It was still sentient, but it was crippled. Its residual abilities were not much more than a human's. I took it—her—home. Now, we spend most of our time in a simulation of our old apartment, in a Virtual never-never-land. I've tried to figure out why she did what she did. Already mad with the desolating quantum loneliness of her birth, she'd been brought out of her black hole prison, and was presented with all the Ghosts' data on the future. And, desperately intelligent, she suffered a vision of that future. It was a vision of the destruction of all baryonic life, the desolate victory of the photino creatures: it was a rigid, logical and inescapable product of her own infinite intellect. It was a vision she couldn't bear. So—perhaps—she subverted the Ghosts' hubristic experiments—which do, incidentally, seem to have been genuinely aimed at a peaceful rapprochement with the photino birds. She allowed the Ghosts to make a dark matter bomb. Perhaps she was trying to open up a war with the photino birds, a new front, with a weapon that even the Xeelee had never considered. Or perhaps she sought, simply, her own destruction. Release, from the terrible burden of infinite knowledge. Even she doesn't know any longer. As for myself, I can never know if Eve's bleak vision—given to me in those startling, fragmented glimpses—represents the true future history of our Universe. Perhaps it was just some mad fiction, concocted by her huge but damaged soul. Or perhaps it is only one strand of the truth; perhaps that gloomy future can, in the end, be averted. Otherwise, in just a few million years, all humankind will be extinct in this Universe. And all our technology and intelligence and courage won't make a damn bit of difference in averting that fate. If that's true, it's up to us to live as if it were not so. I care for Eve, as best I can. We go on. What else is there for us to do?