The Pauli Exclusion Principle could not work, and electron degeneracy pressure would fail. The star core must implode… all the way, past the neutron star compaction limit, on to become a black hole.

“Actually,” the Ambassador said smoothly, “there are technicalities you didn’t consider. For example, no electron can have zero spin value. Nor can any fermion. Presumably the core fermions are collapsing to bosons, like photons… The physics must be interesting in there.”

“Whatever. It worked, didn’t it?”

“Yes. We have contained the Planck Zero sac expansion. Within an event horizon, for all time.”

“And we’ve locked away your Planck Zero AI.”

The Ghost thought that over. “That is important to you?”

“What did you sense, inside the sac?”

“Infinite power… and anger.”

“There was more, Ambassador. In discontinuous space, without the anchorage of quantum wave functions, it was utterly alone. And lonely. And it was furious. Do you see?”

Quantum loneliness.

I had recognized a fellow sufferer. In my loneliness I can only hurt myself, but the mind-device had an infinite capacity for destruction. Still, it was trapped now…

Then I began to wonder, and I haven’t been able to stop. Is there any way out of a black hole?

The images conjured up by Eve had been like reflections in the glimmering walls of the Planck sac.

I brooded, for a while unable to speak.

Eve asked, “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know.”

I’d relived it all again. The rebuilding. The horror of that quantum loneliness.

“Nobody should have to go through that twice,” I said angrily.

“I know, Jack. And I’m sorry. But it’s important that—”

“ — I understand. I know. What next, Eve?”

“Next,” she said, “we’ll look ahead…”

“Ahead? Into the future? How is that possible?”

“Watch,” she said. “Just watch.”

…Five thousand years in the future, and ten thousand years after its first eruption from Earth, humanity’s colonization wavefront spread at lightspeed through the Galaxy.

Its experiences, at the hands of the Qax and others, had changed humanity.

Never again would humanity be made to serve at the behest of some alien power.

As humans grew in power, the conquest of other species became an industry. A new era began.

PART 4

ERA: Assimilation

The Gödel Sunflowers

It was one of the oldest stars in the Galaxy, a sphere of primordial matter hovering in the halo like a failed beacon. About five hundred of its contemporaries still sprinkled photons over the young-matter soup of the swirling main disc, defiant against the erosion of aeons.

But this star had failed, long since. Now it was choked with iron; carbon dusted its cooling surface.

The artifact humans called the Snowflake surrounded this dwarf star, a vast setting for an ancient, faded jewel.

Since the construction of the Snowflake, fourteen billion years had shivered across the swirling face of the Galaxy.

Now, at last, from out of the main disc, a ship was climbing up to the Snowflake.

Throughout his voyage from Earth aboard the Spline warship, Kapur remained alone. Endlessly he studied Virtuals on his destination, trying to comprehend the task that confronted him.

Kapur would be given five days to complete his task.

He was a policeman, seconded to this assignment. In the fleshy warmth of the Spline’s interior, the enormity of the crime he must prevent kept Kapur awake for long hours.

The Spline ship was a mile-wide ball of hardened flesh. Buried deep in pockmarks, sensors which had once been eyes turned slowly in response to the electronic prompting of humans.

The Spline sailed to within a hundred million miles of the Snowflake, slowed, stopped. For days it hovered. A swarm of passive, powerless probes were sprinkled cautiously over the Snowflake.

The disc of the Galaxy was smoke shot through with starlight, a carpet beneath this slow tableau.

At last the flesh of the Spline puckered, split, parted. A childcraft, a cylinder of silver, wriggled out of the revealed orifice. The child spread shining sails and shook them into a parasol shape; the sails seemed to glisten, as if damp from the womb.

Ruby-red laser light seared from the Spline, lanced into the sails. Slowly, slowly, the fine material billowed in response and filled out. Like thistledown, goaded by the laser-breath of the Spline, the child-yacht descended towards the Snowflake.

The interior of the yacht was a box twenty feet long and six wide. It was too small for two men and the equipment which kept them alive.

Kapur sat before the viewport which formed much of the nose of the yacht. Through the port he could see the dwindling fist of flesh that was the Spline freighter, the perpetually startling sight of the Galaxy in plain view. But even though the yacht was now mere hours away from its rendezvous, of the Snowflake he still saw nothing; not even a rusty smudge, he thought sourly.

Mace, the yacht’s other occupant, sat close to Kapur. He peered out with interest, his Eyes gleaming like an insect’s. Mace was a Navy man. Kapur, dark, slim, uncomfortable in his borrowed Navy uniform, shrank from Mace’s confident bulk.

Mace swiveled his turret of a head towards Kapur. “Well? What do you think of the ’Flake?”

Kapur shrugged, in the small space he occupied. “What do you expect me to think?”

Mace peered at Kapur, then frowned. “Maybe if you Opened your Eyes you could form an opinion.”

Kapur, reluctant, complied.

His Eyes’ response spectrum broadened away from the narrow human band; his retinae stung under a sleet of photons of all wavelengths.

The Galaxy dazzled, its core shrieking X-rays. The Snowflake emerged from the darkness like frost crystallizing on a windowpane.

“Let’s get to work,” Mace said. “We’ll review the gross features first. OK?”

Kapur, his Eyes full of the infinite recesses of the Snowflake, did not reply.

“The ’Flake is a regular tetrahedron,” Mace said. “It’s built around the remains of a black dwarf; the ancient star is at the tetrahedron’s centroid. The Snowflake measures over ten million miles along its edges. We don’t know how it maintains its structure in the gravity well of the star.” Mace’s voice was bright, clear, interested, and entirely lacking in awe. “The artifact has the mass of the Earth, approximately. But the Earth is eight thousand miles wide. This thing has been puffed out like candy-floss; it’s filled with struts, threads and whiskers of iron, like delicate scaffolding. The structure’s not a bad approximation to a space-filling curve. Strictly speaking it has a fractional dimension, somewhere between two and three… And it has a fractal architecture. Do you know what that means?”

“I don’t have a math background,” Kapur said.

Mace let his silence comment on that for a long second. “You’re going to do well with the Gödel theorem, then,” he said lightly.

“What?”

“Never mind. When we inspect the ’Flake closely we’ll find the tetrahedron motif, repeated again and again, on all scales. That’s why we call it the Snowflake,” Mace said. “Not because of its shape, but because a snowflake is fractal too. Recursive structures at all scales. And it’s been there a long time.”

“How do you know that?”

Mace, his Eyes fixed on the ’Flake, absently rubbed at his nostrils with his palm. “Because it’s so damn cold. In the aeons since its sun died, it’s cooled to close to the background temperature of the Universe — three degrees above absolute zero… although,” he mused, “when the thing was built the sky still shone at about eighteen K.