Hope thought it was very strange to hear this obviously gentle man talk of such profound destruction.

Nilis closed down his last Virtuals. He faced his audience, hands on hips. “You may say to me, why must this be done? And why now? Why you? After all the war is not being lost. We and the Xeelee have held each other at bay for three thousand years. Why should it fall to you to strike this blow — and, I’m afraid for many of you, to pay the price?

“I’ll tell you why. Because, after twenty thousand years of the Third Expansion, the majority of mankind are soldiers — and most are still children when they die. Most people don’t grow old. They don’t even grow old enough to understand what is happening to them. To our soldiers war is a game, whose lethality they never grasp. This is what we are: this is what we have made ourselves. And the numbers are terrible: in a century, more people die in this war than all the human beings who ever lived on Earth before mankind first reached the stars.”

He stalked around the dais. He was an old, overweight man walking back and forth, almost comically intense. “The Prime Radiant is central to everything the Xeelee do in this Galaxy. To strike at Chandra will be as devastating to the Xeelee as if they turned their starbreaker beams on Earth itself. And that is what we will do. We will stop this war. And we will stop it now.”

When he had finished speaking, there was a cold, stunned silence.

Marshal Kimmer stood now; he had been seated among the flight crews, at the front of the room. He said simply, “I know that you will make this attack succeed. I know you will inflict a tremendous amount of damage. And I know, yes, that you will make history.” Where Nilis had been received in silence, Kimmer won a cheer. He finished, “The first launches will be at reveille tomorrow.” And with that he turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

When Pirius’s detailed briefing was over the crews dispersed quickly.

Hope hurried to the hangar. There was much to be done. But word had already filtered back to the ground crews about the nature of the mission, and the atmosphere was dark and silent. It was like working in a morgue. But they got the job done anyhow.

At the end of the day Enduring Hope went to find This Burden Must Pass.

Burden was in a barracks, surrounded by a small circle of somber-faced flight crew — and not all of them were Friends. Hope joined the little circle, and listened to Burden’s gentle conversation of love and hope, fear and endurance, and the consoling transience of all things.

But though his voice was steady, strain showed on Burden’s face, like a dark shadow.

Chapter 51

The universe was now about the size of Sol system, and still swelling.

And even before baryogenesis was complete, another transition was approaching. The new baryons gathered in combinations of two, three, four, or more. These were atomic nuclei — although nothing like atoms, with their extended clouds of electrons, could yet exist; each nucleus was bare.

These simple nuclei spontaneously formed from the soup of protons and neutrons, but the background radiation was still hot enough that such clusters were quickly broken up again. That would soon change, though: just as there had been a moment when matter could no longer evaporate back to radiant energy, and a moment when quarks no longer evaporated out of baryons, soon would come a time when atomic nuclei became stable, locking up free baryons. This was nucleosynthesis.

For the last quagmites, huddled in their arks, it was hard to imagine any form of life that could exploit such double-dead stuff, with quarks locked inside baryons locked inside nuclei. But from a certain point on, such nuclear matter must inevitably dominate the universe, and any life that arose in the future would be constructed of it.

The quagmites wanted to be remembered. They had determined that any creatures of the remote future, made of cold, dead, nuclear stuff, would not forget them. And they saw an opportunity.

At last the moment of nucleosynthesis arrived.

The universe’s prevailing temperature and pressure determined the products of this mighty nucleus- baking. Around three-quarters of the nuclei formed would be hydrogen — simple protons. Most of the rest would be helium, combinations of four baryons. Any nuclei more complex would be — ought to be — vanishingly rare; a universe of simple elements would emerge from this new transition.

But the quagmites saw a way to change the cosmic oven’s settings.

The fleet of arks sailed through the cosmos, gathering matter with gauzy magnetic wings. Here a knotted cloud was formed, there a rarefied patch left exposed. They worked assiduously, laboring to make the universe a good deal more clumpy than it had been before. And this clumpiness promoted the baking, not just of hydrogen and helium nuclei, but of a heavier nucleus, a form of lithium — three protons and four neutrons. There was only a trace of it compared to the hydrogen and helium; the quagmites didn’t have enough power to achieve more than that. Nevertheless there was too much lithium to be explained away by natural processes.

The scientists of the ages to follow would indeed spot this anomalous “lithium spike,” and would recognize it for what it was: a work of intelligence. At last cold creatures would come to see, and the quagmite arks would begin to tell their story. But that lay far in the future.

With the subatomic drama of nucleosynthesis over, the various survivors sailed resentfully on. There were the last quagmites in their arks, and much-evolved descendants of the spacetime-condensate symbiotes of earlier times yet, all huddling around the primordial black holes. To them the universe was cold and dark, a swollen monster where the temperature was a mere billion degrees, the cosmic density only about twenty times water. The universe was practically a vacuum, they complained, and its best days were already behind it.

The universe was three minutes old.

Chapter 52

That night, the last night before the action, Torec came to the bed of Pirius Blue. She stood at the side of his bunk, silhouetted in the dark.

He hesitated. He had lost Torec before the magnetar action, on the day his life split in two, and since this younger copy of his own Torec had come into his life, he had avoided her. But when she slid into his arms, her scent, her touch, were just as they had been before.

They came together once, quickly; and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. Then they lay together in the dark.

Around them the barracks was half-empty. A lot of crew were unable to sleep. Pila had arranged for the refectories to stay open, so some were eating, and elsewhere people were gambling, joking, playing physical games, all looking for ways to let off the tension.

Torec lay with her head on Blue’s chest, a firm, warm presence. She whispered, “I thought you weren’t going to let me in.”

“I didn’t know if I should.”

“Why?”

“Because…” He sighed. “It’s been a long time since the day I left you on Arches, on that final mission. And you’ve been to Earth! You’ve changed. You always were full of depths, Torec… And I’ve changed, too. I’ve had a chunk deleted out of my life, and been thrown back in time. I’m not me anymore.”

“You’re the same person you were before you left.”

“Am I?” He turned so he could see her shadowed face. “Think about it. In the timeline I came from, I was with you for two years after the point at which I returned to the timeline of Pirius Red, and everything got skewed. You see? We spent all that time together, you and I. But you never lived through those two years, did you?”