She frowned.

He scratched at one eyecup. “On the other hand…”

“What?”

He pointed to the south. “I hear the Parz tribe at the Pole are trying to build a city again.”

Despite herself, she felt stirred — excited. “Like before the Core Wars?”

He looked wistful. “No. No, we’ll never recapture those days. But still, it would be a great project to work on.” He studied her appraisingly. “I hear the new city will be twenty thousand mansheights, from side to side. Think of that. And that’s not counting the Corestuff mine they’re going to build from the base.” He smiled, wrinkles gathering beneath his eyecups.

Thea stared into the south — into the far downflux, to the place where all the vortex lines converged.

Slowly, they began to Wave back to the Crust forest.

The Hero said, “Even the Ur-humans would have been impressed by twenty thousand mansheights, I’ll bet. Why, that’s almost an inch…”

The goals and purpose of the great wars were lost; but still humans fought on, enraged insects battering against the glass-walled lamps of the Xeelee constructs.

The Xeelee, unimpeded, appeared at last to take pity. Humanity was — put aside.

But humanity had been a mere distraction. All the while, the Xeelee confronted a much more dangerous enemy.

PART 6

ERA: Flight

Secret History

C.A.D. 4,000,000

At last the Project was complete.

The migration alone had taken a million years. While the night-dark Xeelee fleets streamed steadily through Bolder’s Ring and disappeared into the folded Kerr-metric region, other races flared in the outer darkness, like candles. Freighters the size of moons patrolled the space around the Ring, their crimson starbreaker beams dispersing the Galaxy remnants that still tumbled towards the Ring like blue-shifted moths.

But now it was over. The Ring, its function fulfilled, sparkled like a jewel in its nest of stars. And the Universe that had been modified by the Xeelee was all but empty of them.

Call it the antiXeelee.

It was… large. Its lofty emotions could be described in human terms only by analogy.

Nevertheless—

The antiXeelee looked on its completed works, and was satisfied.

Its awareness spread across light years. Shining matter littered the Universe like froth on a deep, dark ocean; the Xeelee had come, built fine castles of that froth, and had now departed, as if lifting into the air. Soon the shining stuff itself would begin to decay, and already the antiXeelee could detect the flexing muscles of the creatures of that dark ocean below. It felt something like contentment at the thought that its siblings were beyond the reach of those… others.

Now the antiXeelee turned to its last task. Seed pods, spinning cubes as large as worlds, were scattered everywhere in an orderly array, millions of them dispersed over the unraveling curve of space. The antiXeelee ran metaphorical fingers over each of the pods and over what lay within: beings with closed eyes, ships with folded wings, refined reflections of the antiXeelee itself.

The work was good. And now it was ready.

…There was a discontinuity. All over the Universe the pods vanished like soap bubbles.

The seed pods’ long journey back through time had begun. They would emerge a mere hundred thousand years after the singularity itself, at the moment when the temperature of the cosmos had cooled sufficiently for matter and radiation to become decoupled — so that the infant Universe became suddenly transparent, as if with a clash of cymbals.

Then the creatures within would unfold their limbs, and the long Project of the Xeelee would begin.

Eventually the Project would lead to the development of the seed pods, the spawning of the antiXeelee itself; and so the circle would be closed. There was, of course, no paradox about this causal loop; although — for amusement — the antiXeelee had once studied a toy-creature, a human from whose viewpoint such events had seemed not merely paradoxical but impossible. Something like a smile reflex spread through its awareness. (… And, revived like an afterthought by the immense memory, the toy-creature whispered once more into being, a faint coherence in the vacuum.)

So its work was done; the antiXeelee could let go. It spread wide and thin.

Forgotten, the toy-creature stirred like an insect in its cocoon.

Paul opened his eyes.

The antiXeelee hovered over Paul.

He was — discorporeal; it was as if the jewel of consciousness which had lain behind his eyes had been plucked out of his body and flung into space. He did not even have heartbeats to count. He remembered ruefully the casual contempt with which he had regarded Taft, Green and the rest on the Sugar Lump, how he had soared over their shambling, makeshift bodies, their limited awareness!

…And yet now, stranded, with no idea why he was here, he would have given a great deal to return to the comforting furniture of a human body.

At least the antiXeelee was here with him. It was like a great ceiling under which he hovered and buzzed, insectlike. He sensed a vast, satisfied weariness in its mood, the contentment of the traveler at the end of a long and difficult road. For a long time he stayed within the glow of its protection.

Then it began to dissolve.

Paul wanted to cry out, like a child after its huge parent. He was buffeted, battered. It was as if a glacier of memories and emotions was calving into a hundred icebergs about him; and now those icebergs in turn burst into shards which melted into the surface of a waiting sea…

With a brief, non-localized burst of selectrons and neutralinos the awareness of the antiXeelee multiplied, fragmented, shattered, sank into the vacuum.

And Paul was left alone.

It was impossible to measure time, other than by the slow evolution of his own emotions.

He had lived among people no more than a few months, on the Xeelee seed pod they had called the Sugar Lump; but in that time he had been shown visions, sounds, scents, tactile images from all the worlds of the human empire, and he had formed an impression of the great storm of souls that constituted the human race. Each of those souls, he knew, was like a tiny line drawn in space-time, with a neat start, a thickening into self-awareness and a clean conclusion. The race was — had been — a vast, dynamic drawing of billions of such lifelines.

He, Paul, spoiled the picture.

His lifeline began in a tight, acausal knot wrapped around the Sugar Lump — and was then dragged across the face of the picture like a vandal’s scribble — and finished here, a loose end beyond the conclusion of history.

He felt no privilege to be here. His life was artificial, a construct, a random jotting of the Xeelee. He could see inside stars… but he had never looked into a human heart.

He endured despair. Why had he been brought to this point in space-time and then so casually abandoned? Had he been correct in detecting a strain of amusement in the vast, crashing symphony of the antiXeelee’s thoughts? Was he truly no more than a toy?

The despair turned to anger, and lasted a long time.

Later he became curious about the aging Universe around him. He had no senses, of course: no eyes, no ears, no fingers; nevertheless he tried to construct a simulacrum of a human awareness, to assign human labels to the objects and processes around him.

There were still stars. He saw sheets of them, bands and rays, complex arrays.

Evidently the Xeelee had remade the Universe.