As the record time of two hours flying behind a shield approached, Pirius felt some of the tension seep out of his body.
Nilis, a Virtual uncomfortably lodged in the cockpit with Pirius, was, after the first hour or so, relaxed enough to dip into the comm loops between the ships. He was particularly intrigued by the conversation between This Burden Must Pass, the notorious Friend of Wigner, and the Silver Ghost in the lead ship. Burden was taking the chance of talking to the Ghost away from its Guardians.
“And so you believe,” came the Ghost’s simulated voice, “that this universe is essentially transient — all you sense, all you achieve, even your experiences of your inner self will pass away.”
“Not transient, exactly,” Burden called back. “Just one of an uncountably infinite number of possibilities which will, cumulatively, be resolved at timelike infinity, after the manner of a collapse of quantum functions.”
“But in that case, what basis for morality can there be?”
“There is a moral basis for every decision,” said Burden. “To show loyalty to one’s fellows — to put oneself in harm’s way for the sake of one’s species. And while this is only one out of a myriad timelines, we believe that the, umm, the goodness in each timeline will sum at the decision point at timelike infinity to gather into Optimality…”
“Fascinating,” Nilis said to Pirius. The Commissary whispered, as if he might be overheard. “They are fencing, in a way. Each knows far more about the other’s beliefs than either is prepared to reveal. Fencing, and yet looking for common ground.”
Pirius Red was light on moral philosophy. “That stuff about putting one’s self in the way of harm for others — that sounded like Doctrine to me.”
“So it is,” Nilis said. “Much of the Friends’ ’philosophy’ is actually recycled Druzism — as you’d expect, given the environment it sprang from. Hama Druz seems to have believed that self-interest is the primary driver of any unthinking human action. He said that soldiers are therefore the only moral citizens of any society because only they have demonstrated their selfless morality by putting themselves in harm’s way.” He sniffed. “Of course Druz ignored the plentiful evidence of kinship bonds among the animals and insects — an ant isn’t driven by simple selfishness — and he certainly ignored Coalescences, human hive societies, which were plentiful even in his day. Druz was a good sloganeer, and he obviously was a key figure in human history. But he really wasn’t a very sophisticated thinker — I’ve always found his arguments terribly one-dimensional — haven’t you?”
Even now Pirius was horrified by such blasphemy, and he deflected the remark. “There’s more than just Druzism in Burden’s beliefs.”
“Oh, of course. The other element is this basic notion that this universe is an imperfect place that can somehow be fixed. It’s an expression of a feeling of betrayal, you see, a sense that one’s life is irredeemably imperfect and can never be made good. I can quite understand such a creed arising in a society of child soldiers — deliberately kept in miserable conditions as a motivator to fight — whose only escape is either to die young fighting, or grow old in shame. No wonder they want to believe things can be made better. They are quite right!
“But what’s interesting is that the Silver Ghosts came up with a similar belief. They too were betrayed by the universe, when their sun failed and their world froze over. They elaborated such traumas into a belief that the universe is a hostile place that must be tamed. But they sublimated their feelings of anger, not into the passive acceptance of the Friends, but into programs of exotic physics. They sought ways to change the universe — they tried to make it better!”
Pirius frowned. “You’re saying that the Friends are a Ghost cult?”
“Perhaps not as crude as that. But Ghost philosophy is the most interesting element in the whole volatile mix of this new creed.
“Humans fought Ghosts for long enough, and earlier we worked with them, too. Perhaps humans swapped beliefs with Ghosts. And if that’s so, perhaps the Friends may be the first interstellar religion, the first to fuse the traditions of two species… The Ultimate Observer could plausibly be a Ghost deity!”
Pirius frowned. “No human would follow a Ghost.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, Pilot. People have followed more bizarre beings in the past, though they were mostly imaginary!” He sipped an invisible drink, not reproduced in the Virtual. “One has to wonder, though, if some such encounter as this wasn’t in the mind of that Ghost up there all the time — perhaps we have been given the gravastar technology as a ploy, so that the Ghosts can achieve their own ends, whatever they are. I suppose the great mixing-up that Project Prime Radiant is inflicting on the orderly pools of the Coalition is a good opportunity for subversion… I always did intend that we should shake up history, you and I. But one must wonder what great oaks might grow from the seeds we are planting today.”
Pirius didn’t like the sound of any of that. It sounded too much like the paranoia Nilis had criticized him for before. With a curt command, he shut down unnecessary chatter on the loops: the conversation between Ghost and Friend immediately stopped.
The little flotilla sailed on, huddling behind its wall of distorted spacetime, with only formal technical communications passing between the ships.
Chapter 47
The universe was expanding at half the speed of light. It was small and ferociously dense, still many times as dense as an atomic nucleus.
At least quarks were stable now. But in this cannonball of a cosmos the matter familiar to humans, composed of protons and neutrons — composites of quarks, stuck together by gluons — could not yet exist. There were certainly no nuclei, no atoms. Instead, space was filled with a soup of quarks, gluons and leptons, light particles like electrons and neutrinos. It was a “quagma,” a magma of quarks, like one immense proton.
As time wore inexorably away, new forms of life rose in the new conditions.
The now-stable quarks were able to combine into large assemblies; and as these assemblies complexified and interacted, the usual processes of autocatalysis and feedback began. The black holes were still there to provide structure, but larger clumps of matter also served as a stratum for life’s new adventures, and there was energy for free in the radiation bath that still filled the universe.
Among the new kinds, ancient strategies revived. There were exploiters and synthesizers. “Plants” fueled their growth with radiant energy — but there were no stars yet, no suns; rather the whole sky glowed. “Animals” evolved to feed off these synthesizers, and learned to hunt each other.
As always the variation in life-forms across the cosmos was extraordinarily wide, but most shared certain basics of their physical design. Almost all of them stored information about themselves in their own complicated structures, rather than in an internal genetic data store, as humans one day would: for these creatures their genotype was their phenotype, as if they were made wholly of DNA.
Their way of communicating would have seemed ferocious to a human. A speaker would modify its listener’s memories directly, by firing quagma pellets into them; it was a message carried in a spray of bullets. They even reproduced rather like DNA molecules. They opened out their structures, like flowers unfolding, and constructed a mirror-image version of themselves by attracting raw material from the surrounding soup of loose quarks. These “quagmites” were not quite like the creatures humans would one day encounter in the Galaxy’s Core, but they were their remote ancestors.