Berg smiled. "I think so. Though I must chide you for thinking small. The Friends of Wigner have projects that extend to the end of time."

"Yes. And as for their future, I suspect they are already engaged on designs of their own."

She nodded. "You’ve told me what Shira said. Take the long way home, by surviving through the centuries until the era of your birth returns… and then what? Start the whole damn business over again?"

"Perhaps. Though I hear they’ve done a little more thinking since I spoke to Shira. You mention a sublight star trip. I think that would appeal to the Friends, if only because it would let them exploit relativistic time-dilation effects—"

" — and get home that much quicker; in a century instead of fifteen." She smiled. "Well, it’s a way to waste your life, I suppose."

"And you, Miriam? You’ve been a century away yourself; this must be almost as great a dislocation for you as it is for me. What will you do?"

She shrugged, rubbing her hair. "Maybe I’ll go with the Friends," she murmured. "Maybe I’ll take them to the stars and back, journey through fifteen centuries once more—"

" — and see if Michael Poole emerges into the Qax Occupation future, dashing valiantly from the imploding wormhole?" He smiled.

She looked up to the Jupiter-roofed zenith, trying to pick out the pieces of the shattered portal. "It might make me feel better," she said. "But, Jasoft, I know I’ve lost Michael. Wherever he is now I could never reach him."

They sat for a moment, watching images of shattered exotic matter tumble through the discarded slates. At length he said, "Come. It is cold here, and the air is thin. Let us return to the Narlikar boat. I would like some more warmth. And food."

She dropped her head from the sky. "Yeah. That’s a good idea, Jasoft."

She stood, her legs stiff after so long curled beneath her. Almost tenderly Jasoft took her arm, and they walked together to the waiting boat.

Spacetime is friable.

Wormholes riddle the fabric of spacetime on all scales. At the Planck length and below, wormholes arising from quantum uncertainty effects blur the clean Einsteinian lines of spacetime. And some of the wormholes expand to the human scale, and beyond — sometimes spontaneously, and sometimes at the instigation of intelligence.

Spacetime is like a sheet of ice, permeated by flaws, by hairline cracks.

When Michael Poole’s hyperdrive was activated inside the human-built wormhole Interface, it was as if someone had smashed at that ice floe with a mallet. Cracks exploded from the point of impact, widened; they joined each other in a complex, spreading network, a tributary pattern that continually formed and reformed as spacetime healed and shattered anew.

The battered, scorched corpse of the Spline warship bearing the lifedome of the Crab, Michael Poole, and a cloud of rebellious antibody drones emerged from the collapsing wormhole into the Qax Occupation era at close to the speed of light. Sheer energy from the tortured spacetime of the wormhole transformed into high-frequency radiation, into showers of shortlived, exotic particles that founted around the tumbling Spline.

It was like a small sun exploding amid the moons of Jupiter. Vast storms were evoked in the bulk of the gas giant’s atmosphere. A moon was destroyed. Humans were killed, blinded.

Cracks in shattering spacetime propagated at the speed of light.

There was already another macroscopic spacetime wormhole in the Jovian system: the channel set up to a future beyond the destruction of the Qax star, the channel through which Qax had traveled toward the past, intent on destroy ing humanity.

Under the impact of Poole’s hammer-blow arrival — as Poole had expected — this second spacetime flaw could not retain its stability.

The wormhole mouth itself expanded, exoticity ballooning across thousands of miles and engulfing the mass-energy of Michael Poole’s unlikely vessel. The icosahedral exotic-matter frame that threaded the wormhole mouth exploded, a mirror image of the destruction witnessed by Miriam Berg fifteen centuries earlier. Then the portal imploded at lightspeed; gravitational shock waves pulsed from the vanishing mouth like Xeelee starbreaker beams, scattering ships and moons like insects in a gale.

Through a transient network of wormholes that imploded after him in a storm of gravity waves and high-energy particles, Michael Poole hurtled helplessly into the future.

Chapter 16

Chains of events threaded the future.

A human called Jim Bolder flew a Xeelee nightfighter into the heart of the Qax home system, causing them to turn their starbreaker weapons on their own sun.

The Qax Occupation of Earth collapsed. Humans would never again be defeated, on a significant scale, by any of the junior species.

Humans spread across stars, their zone of influence expanding at many times lightspeed. A period known as the Assimilation followed; the wisdom and power of other species were absorbed, on an industrial scale.

Soon, only the Xeelee stood between humans and dominance.

The conflict that followed lasted a million years.

When it was resolved only a handful of humans, and human-derived beings, remained anywhere in the universe.

The projects of the Xeelee, the inexorable workings of natural processes, continued to change the universe.

Stars died. More stars formed, to replace those that had already failed… but as the primal mix of hydrogen and helium was polluted with stellar waste products the formation rate of new stars was declining exponentially.

And darker forces were at work. The stars aged… too rapidly.

The Xeelee completed their great projects, and fled the decaying cosmos.

Five million years after the first conflict between human and Qax, the wreckage of a Spline warship emerged, tumbling, from the mouth of a wormhole that blazed with gravitational radiation. The wormhole closed, sparkling.

The wreck — dark, almost bereft of energy — turned slowly in the stillness. It was empty of life.

Almost.

Quantum functions flooded over Michael Poole like blue-violent rain, restoring him to time. He gasped at the pain of rebirth.

Humans would call it the anti-Xeelee.

It was… large. Its lofty emotions could be described in human terms only by analogy.

Nevertheless -

The anti-Xeelee looked on its completed works and was satisfied.

Its awareness spread across light-years. Shining matter littered the universe; the Xeelee had come, built fine castles of that shining froth, and had now departed. Soon the shining stuff itself would begin to decay, and already the anti-Xeelee could detect the flexing muscles of the denizens of that dark ocean that lay below.

The function of the anti-Xeelee had been to guide the huge projects of the Xeelee, the projects whose purpose had been to build a way out of this deadly cosmos. In order to achieve their goals the Xeelee had even moved back through time to modify their own evolution, turning their history into a closed timelike curve, a vacuum diagram. The anti-Xeelee was the consciousness of this process, traveling — like an antiparticle — back in time from the moment of its dissolution to the moment of its creation.

Now the job was done. The anti-Xeelee felt something like contentment at the thought that its charges had escaped, were now beyond the reach of those… others, who the Xeelee had in the end been unable to oppose.