Pirius was baffled. “What harm can a trace of dark matter do?”

“I don’t know,” said Nilis honestly. “The ancients obviously feared it, though. I’ve seen hints in the Archive of much more ambitious projects than this: engineered humans injected into the dark matter streams in the heart of the sun, and so on.”

And Luru Parz, Pirius thought, who might herself be a survivor of those ancient times, still watched dark matter at the other extreme of Sol system. Here was another deep secret, another ancient fear.

“Commissary, you aren’t interested in what’s going on in the sun.”

“No. But I am interested in primordial nucleosynthesis.” That was the other source of neutrinos. He was talking about the Big Bang.

As the universe expanded from its initial singularity, Nilis said, physics evolved rapidly. In the first microsecond, space was filled with quagma, a swarming magma of quarks, as if the whole universe was a single huge proton. But the universe expanded and cooled, and by the end of the first second most of the quarks had been locked up into baryonic particles, protons and neutrons. For the next few minutes, the universe was a ferocious cauldron of nuclear reactions, as evanescent atomic nuclei formed, almost immediately breaking up again, unstable in the ferocious heat. Neutrinos took part in this shatteringly rapid dance.

But then, as the temperature dropped further, simple nuclei like helium suddenly became stable. The universe froze out. Just three minutes after the singularity this flurry of nucleosynthesis was over, and expanding space was filled with hydrogen and helium. There would be no more baking of nuclei until much later in the life of the universe, when the first stars formed.

“And with no more nucleosynthesis,” said Nilis, “the primordial neutrinos no longer interacted with matter. To them the universe, at three minutes old, was already just about transparent. Those ancient neutrinos still drench space even today. Now, Venus was designed to watch neutrinos from the sun—”

“But a neutrino is a neutrino,” Pirius said.

“Yes. And in those primordial neutrinos can be read a story of the earliest moments of the universe. And it is a story of life, Ensign.”

“Life?”

“Quagmites.”

It had actually been the analysis of the damage suffered by Pirius Blue’s greenship, the Assimilator’s Claw, that had prompted Nilis to come here to Venus, to start thinking about neutrinos.

“It was I who ordered that your ship be subject to a proper forensic examination,” he said. “After all, it had been in close proximity to the Xeelee — not to mention a magnetar! I believed your ship might carry traces of its adventures from which we might learn more. And so I wanted it to be given more than a cursory glance in an Engineering Guild repair shop.”

What Nilis’s scientists had discovered had not, in the event, been about the Xeelee at all, or even the magnetar. It was quagmites.

Nilis said, “Have you really never wondered what quagmites actually are? And how they come to be so attracted to GUT energies?”

“No,” Pirius said honestly. To pilots, quagmites were just an odd kind of virus which gave you trouble if you used a GUTdrive anywhere in the Central Star Mass. Since GUTdrives were essentially an obsolete technology, carried as backup in case more effective sublight-drive systems failed, nobody ever gave quagmites much thought.

“Yes, yes, I understand your point of view,” Nilis said. “You aren’t even interested in the fact that these things are so obviously alive, are you?”

Pirius shrugged. Life in itself wasn’t very interesting; as mankind had moved across the face of the Galaxy, life had been discovered everywhere.

“Pirius, when its GUTdrive lit up, the Claw was peppered by small, but dense projectiles.” He clapped his hands and produced a Virtual image of the greenship. A translucent cutaway, it was laced through by a complex tracery of shining straight lines. “You were shot up, as if you had flown through a hail of bullets. The particles were bits of quagma, and they left tracks like vapor trails in the matter they passed through. The scars cut through everything — the hull, the equipment, even the bodies of you and your crew. But those greenships are tough little vessels; your systems took a lot of damage, but there was enough redundancy to see you through.”

“We’re used to quagmites, I suppose,” Pirius said. “We design around them.”

“But look,” Nilis said, and he traced the lines with his fingers. “Look here, and here… Can’t you see, even in this simple summary image? These lines weren’t inflicted at random. There are patterns here, Pilot! And where there are patterns there is information.

“Every aspect of the lines seems to contain data: their positions in three dimensions, the timing with which they were inflicted, the nature of the projectiles which caused them. There’s really a remarkable amount of information, here in these scars — a whole library full, I suspect. Not that I have come anywhere near extracting more than a fraction of it yet. It seems a coarse way to leave a message, like signing one’s name with bullets sprayed at a wall. But you can’t deny it’s effective!

“You must see the significance of this discovery. The quagmites were attracted to your GUTdrive energy, yes; they appear to feed off it. But they weren’t attacking you. They were trying to communicate with you. And in those two facts, I believe, lies the answer to the mystery of the quagmites’ nature.

“The quagmites are alive, Pirius. They are creatures of this universe, just as we are. But the stuff of which they are made isn’t so common now. Do you see? Once again we have to confront universal history. For the quagmites — like the Xeelee! — are survivors of a much earlier age…”

He spoke of those moments before nucleosynthesis, just a microsecond or so after the singularity, when the universe was a soup of quarks, a quagma. The quagmites had swarmed through a quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. But the quagma cooled. Their life-sustaining fluid congealed into cold protons and neutrons, and then further into atomic nuclei. They were thinking beings, but there was nothing they could do about the end of their world.

“They found a way to survive the great cosmic transition, the congealing of their life stuff.” His rheumy eyes were vague, as he considered prospects invisible to Pirius. “I wonder what they see, when they look at us. To them we are cold, dead things, made of dead stuff. All they see is the occasional bright spark of our GUTdrives. And when they do, they come to feed, and to talk to us.”

“Not to us,” Pirius said. “To our ships.”

“Ha!” Nilis slapped his thigh. “Of course, of course. I have to say this is not entirely an original insight. Quagmites have been studied before. The lessons are still there, I found, but buried deep in our Archives. Sometimes I wonder how much we have forgotten, how little we retain — and the older our culture grows the more wisdom we lose. What a desolating thought!”

Pirius tried to bring him back to the point. “Commissary, I don’t see what this has to do with the Project.”

“Well, nor do I,” Nilis said cheerfully. “Which is why we have to find out! You see, I deduced from the captured nightfighter that the Xeelee too are relics of an earlier cosmic epoch, earlier even than the quagmites. Surely it isn’t a coincidence that we find them both swarming around Chandra!” Nilis rubbed his face, smoothing out his jowly flesh. “Clearly there is a pattern, which we must understand. That is why I have been seeking ways to study the early universe, like this neutrino telescope. And I must continue to study, to gather data, to learn… But if any of this is correct, there is the question of why.”