They continued to stare. But then Pirius Blue, his own older self, raised his hands and began to clap, slowly, deliberately. Burden joined in, and Hope, and others; at last they were all applauding together.
When he had dismissed them, Pirius turned to Pila. “Thank you,” he said fervently.
She shrugged. “Next time you make a speech I’ll draft it for you.” A sheaf of Virtuals whirled in the air before her. “In the meantime, Squadron Leader, we have work to do.”
Chapter 45
Among the cultures of matter and antimatter, clinging to their evanescent quark-gluon islands in a sea of radiation, a crisis approached.
As the universe cooled, the rate of production of quarks and anti-quarks from the radiation soup inevitably slowed — but the mutual destruction of the particles continued at a constant rate. Scientists on each side of the parity barrier foresaw a time when no more quarks would coalesce — and then, inevitably, all particles of matter would be annihilated, as would the precisely equal number of particles of antimatter, leaving a universe filled with nothing but featureless, reddening light. It would mean extinction for their kinds of life; it was hardly a satisfactory prospect.
Slowly but surely, plans were drawn up to fix this bug in the universe. At last an empire of matter- cluster creatures discovered that it was possible to meddle with the fundamental bookkeeping of the cosmos.
Human scientists would express much of their physics in terms of symmetries: the conservation of energy, for instance, was really a kind of symmetry. And humans would always believe that a certain symmetry of a combination of electrical charge, left- and right-handedness, and the flow of time could never be violated. But now quark-gluon scientists dug deep into an ancient black hole, which had decayed to expose the singularity at its heart. The singularity was like a wall in the universe — and by reaching through this wall the quark scientists found a way to violate the most fundamental symmetry of all.
The imbalance they induced was subtle: for every thirty million antimatter particles, thirty million and one matter particles would be formed — and when they annihilated, that one spare matter particle would survive.
The immediate consequence was inevitable. When the antimatter cultures learned they were to be extinguished while their counterparts of matter would linger on, there was a final, devastating war; fleets of opposing parity annihilated each other in a bonfire of possibilities.
Enough of the matter cultures survived to carry through their program. But it was an anguished victory; even for the victors only a fraction could survive.
Another metaphorical switch was pulled.
Across the cooling cosmos, the mutual annihilation continued to its conclusion. When the storm of co-destruction ceased, when all the antimatter was gone, there was a trace of matter left over. Another mystery was left for the human scientists of the future, who would always wonder at the baffling existence of an excess of matter over antimatter.
Yet again the universe had passed through a transition; yet again a generation of life had vanished,
leaving only scattered survivors, and the ruins of vanished and forgotten civilizations. For its few remaining inhabitants the universe now seemed a very old place indeed, old and bloated, cool and dark.
Since the singularity, one millionth of a second had passed.
Chapter 46
Running behind a grav shield was like flying into an endless tunnel.
From her pilot’s blister, Torec looked ahead through the usual clutter of Virtual warning flags, at a wall of turbulence. The result of the gravastar shield’s spacetime distortions, it was like a breaking wave front, roughly circular, blue-white Core light mixed up and muddled and somehow stretched out in a way that hurt her eyes. There was something deeply unsettling about it, she thought, something that offended her instincts on some profound level.
When she glanced around she could see bright green sparks arrayed around her field of view. They were the other greenships of her flight, which was led today by Pirius Blue, high up there in Torec’s sky — Blue, the weird, embittered future-twin version of her own Pirius, who had unaccountably been made flight commander.
The squadron was learning how to fly in formation, and with the grav shield. This was Torec’s second training run of the day, her tenth of the week so far, and in the turnarounds she hadn’t caught a great deal of sleep. But she put aside her eyeball-prickling fatigue and peered ahead, trying to stay focused on the peculiar phenomenon that might one day save her life, if it didn’t kill her first.
The gravastar shield was something not quite of this universe, and the product of inhuman Ghost technology too. No wonder it looked weird. But the theory of its use was simple. Just fly in behind the grav shield, keep to your formation, follow your leader. The flaw was receding from her at nearly lightspeed, and it was her job to keep her greenship plummeting after it, tucked up into this more or less liveable pocket of smooth spacetime, not so close that the tidal stresses and fallout from the shield itself were so severe that they would destroy you, and yet close enough that the Xeelee could have no foreknowledge of your approach, because — and it still took her some hard thinking to grasp this — you were effectively in another universe.
At the center of her field of view was a greenship tucked right in behind the wall of curdled horror. That ship, the “shield-master” as the crews called it, was laden with the grav field generators. Today it was piloted by Jees, the sullen, determined prosthetic rescued from admin duties by Pirius Red, now proving to be one of the best pilots in Exultant Squadron. There was nobody Torec would have preferred to see up there at point than Jees; if anybody could manage the propagation of a kilometer- wide wave front of spacetime distortion it was her.
But as Torec watched, that central green pinpoint wavered, just subtly. It was enough to send alarms sounding in Torec’s head, long before her Virtual displays lit up with more red flags.
Jees was having stability problems. Already Torec could see the shimmering of the grav shield front, and spacetime distortions heading back down the “tunnel” toward her own ship. They made the images of the more distant stars ripple and swarm, as if seen through a heat haze.
“Here we go again,” she called. “Brace for impact.”
“Pilot, Engineer. I got it. Locking down systems.” That was her engineer, Cabel: very young, very intense.
Torec called, “Navigator? What about you?” When there was no reply, she snapped, “Three. Lethe, girl, wake up.”
Tili Three called back, “Uh — Pilot, Navigator. I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be sorry. Just do your job.” She glanced at her displays. “Impact in thirty. Twenty-nine…”
Cabel, seventeen years old, was very able, and had completed his training for this flight in days. He was one of Pirius Blue’s “baby rats,” as Pirius Red put it a bit sourly, rescued by Pirius’s older self from the lethal servitude of Quin. Having worked with Cabel intensely, Torec backed Blue’s judgment.
Tili Three was another baby rat — but she was different. If anything, she was intrinsically smarter than Cabel. Though she had come into the squadron without having completed her basic navigator training, Pirius Blue had insisted on pushing her into Exultant, and now she had wound up in Torec’s crew. Torec had no doubt about her basic ability, in the classroom. But on these training runs — Lethe, even in the sims — she just couldn’t cut it. And so it seemed to be now.