“Nilis is more than a dreamer.”

“Well, perhaps. But, as I say, he isn’t unique. It doesn’t take a genius to perceive that our glorious war effort has stalled, that it is an exercise in monstrous waste. At any moment there must be dozens of Nilises running around with bright ideas for shortening or ending the war.” He rubbed his greasy jowl. “And maybe once a generation you will have a true Nilis, a plan so well thought-out, so convincing, that you believe it might, just might, work.”

“Once a generation?”

“It’s in the records. No doubt Nilis himself is aware of many of them.”

“But since the war began, there have been a lot of generations.”

Gramm laughed. “Quite so. And a lot of bright ideas. Some of them probably bore passing resemblances to Nilis’s scheme.”

“So what happened to them?”

“They were blocked. By people like me.” He shifted and stared at Pirius. “Look at it from my point of view. Now, I know that to win the war we’re going to have to take a risk. But the question is which risk? Is Nilis’s idea the one—”

“Or should you wait until a smarter idea comes along?”

Gramm’s eyes narrowed. “You do have qualities, Ensign; I can see why Nilis plucked you out of the mire. You see, the easiest thing for me to do would be to pass on this Project of yours — not even to turn it down; just to stall. I won’t be in this office forever. Let my successor make the difficult decisions, if she dares. This war has lasted three thousand years. The battle is not mine. I am merely… a custodian. How could I bear it if the crucial failure came on my watch?… But I fear deferral isn’t an option for me.”

“Sir? Why not?”

“Because we’re losing.”

The vast Galaxy-wide operation, held together by the rigid ideology and ruthless policies of the Coalition, was containing the Xeelee. But mankind really was stretched to the limit. And, bit by bit, entropy was taking its toll.

“You can forget about this theoretical Commissary nonsense of a perpetual war, of forging a perfect mankind in its cold fire. The machine isn’t that perfect, believe me. We won’t fall tomorrow, or the day after. I don’t know when it will come — probably not even in my time. But come it will.” He stared at the ensign again, and Pirius saw despair in his deep-sunk eyes. “Now do you see why I’m listening to Nilis?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I know Nilis understands this history, and he’s learned from it. He’s played the bureaucratic game with surprising skill, you know. But now we’re beyond games, and coming to the crunch decision. Can you promise me that your mentor’s lunatic scheme is going to work?”

“No, sir.”

“No. How easy it would be if you could!”

Pirius thought he understood. This man, so alien to anything in Pirius’s background, was conscientiously trying to make an impossible decision, a decision that could save or doom mankind, one of a hundred such decisions that faced him daily, against a background of half-truths, hope, promises, and lies. “We both have our duty, sir. As you implied, perhaps mine is easier.”

Gramm rubbed his eyes with fleshy fingers. “Lethe, Ensign, that pompous old fool Kolo Yehn was right. Whatever we’re running out of, at least there’s no shortage of courage. Get out of here.” He waved his hand. “Go, before I have to throw you out.”

Pirius reported this conversation to Nilis. He didn’t anticipate the Commissary’s reaction.

“You see what this means.” Nilis was whispering, wide-eyed, his hands locked together in a white- knuckled grip.

“Sir?”

“Gramm is going to say yes — he’s going to back us. Of course he has to get the decision from his committee. But if he backs it, it will be hard for any of them not to follow along. We’re going to the Core, Ensign. We’re going to have our squadron.” Nilis padded around his room, plucking at his fingers.

Pirius shook his head. “Then why aren’t you leaping with joy, Commissary?”

“Because they’ve called my bluff,” he said rapidly. He seemed terrified. “While I was pushing against a locked door it was easy to be bold. But now the door has swung open, and I have to deliver on my promises.” He turned to Pirius. “Oh, my eyes, my eyes! What have I done? Pirius, what have I done?”

There was no place. There was no time. A human observer would have recognized nothing here: no mass, energy, or force. There was only a rolling, random froth whose fragmented geometry constantly changed. Even causality was a foolish dream.

The orderly spacetime with which humans were familiar was suffused with vacuum energy, out of which virtual particles, electrons and quarks, would fizz into existence, and then scatter or annihilate, their brief walks upon the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this extraordinary place whole universes bubbled out of the froth, to expand and dissipate, or to collapse in a despairing flare.

This chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of nonbeing where whole universes clustered in reefs of foamy spindrift, was suffused by a light beyond light. But even in this cauldron of strangeness there was life. Even here there was mind.

Call them monads.

This would be the label given them by Commissary Nilis, when he deduced their existence. But the name had much deeper roots.

In the seventeenth century the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz had imagined that reality was constructed from pseudo-objects that owed their existence solely to their relation to each other. In his idea of the “monad,” Leibniz had intuited something of the truth of the creatures who infested this domain. They existed, they communicated, they enjoyed a richness of experience and community. And yet “they” didn’t exist in themselves; it was only their relationships to each other that defined their own abstract entities.

No other form of life was possible in this fractured place.

Long ago they had attended the birth of a universe.

It had come from a similar cauldron of realities, a single bubble plucked out of the spindrift. As the baby universe had expanded and cooled, the monads had remained with it. Immanent in the new cosmos, they suffused it, surrounded it. Time to them was not as experienced by the universe’s swarming inhabitants; their perception was like the reality dust of configuration space, perhaps.

But once its reality had congealed, once the supracosmic froth had cooled, the monads were forced into dormancy. Wrapped up in protective knots of spacetime, they dreamed away the long history of their universe, with all its empires and wars, its tragedies and triumphs. It had been the usual story — and yet it was a unique story, for no two universes were ever quite the same. And something of this long saga would always be stored in the monads’ dreaming.

The universe aged, as all things must; within, time grew impossibly long and space stretched impossibly thin. At last the fabric of the universe sighed and broke — and a bubble of a higher reality spontaneously emerged, a recurrence of the no-place where time and distance had no meaning. Just as the universe had once been spawned from chaos, so this droplet of chaos was now born from the failing stuff of the universe. Everything was cyclic.