Vacuum Diagrams

The Friend returned, screaming visions at her. She cried out, but she grasped the gloves.

Night-dark Xeelee wings stretched across space for the last time. Ignored by the warring fleets the ship dived towards the Kerr-metric Interface.

As Erwal entered the sea of light there was a moment of farewell, an instant of almost unbearable pain… and then the Friend was gone.

She dropped into strangeness.

The ghost-gray photino birds slid through the Ring’s pale flesh and its bruiselike discoloration spread.

Paul, somber, reflected that the destruction of the Ring had in the end provided the key racial goal for the human race. But now that the end was close the last human — Paul — felt nothing but a cultured sadness, an aesthetic pain at the loss of such power and beauty.

The surviving Qax, too, were, at last, no more than impotent observers, ignored by the photino birds.

After about half a year the photino birds withdrew. The fruit of their labor was a slice through the Ring perhaps a light year thick. Around this darkling slice the substance of the Ring was crumbling, turning to sparkling threads that drifted away from the structure.

The Kerr-metric Interface wavered, dissolved; and the Universe was sealed.

Paul moved his attention foci closer to the gap. The broken threads of cosmic string shriveled from the wound, so that the gap in the Ring widened at near lightspeed.

Photino birds swooped around the wound as if in a huge triumphant dance.

The vast structure had no mechanism to recover from such a wound. Now there was only its long, slow death to play out; and the photino birds, evidently incurious, began to depart, returning their attention to their own mysterious projects.

Like sea waves from the wreck of some immense ship gravity radiation surged out of the Ring’s gravitational well, and at last the vast pit in spacetime began to close.

The observers — the Qax, the last photino bird flocks — began to leave the scene. Paul grasped his quantum threads and slipped into the gathering darkness.

The Xeelee ship emerged from the Kerr-metric Interface. It furled its wings, slid to a halt, and sent its sensors probing into the new Universe.

Erwal stared at a screen that had become suddenly a blank pane of silver, reflecting only her own tired face.

Sura asked, “What does it mean?”

Erwal frowned. “I don’t know.” She tried to move the focus of the screen, but there was no response. And the gloves around her hands were like dead things, inert.

The ship no longer responded to her touch. She withdrew her hands.

“I don’t understand,” Sura said. “Did we pass through the Ring? What should we do?”

“How could I know?” Erwal snapped. “We wait, I suppose.”

Sura stepped away, uncertain.

After some hours, Erwal climbed out of her chair and stretched painfully.

Trying to overcome her enormous sense of anticlimax she established a routine. After each of the next few sleeps she crossed to the control table and slipped her hands into the gloves. But the ship remained inert, sealed off.

Gradually her routine broke down.

She was tired, and she had had enough mystery. She tried to settle into life inside this odd ship-village and forget the strangeness outside.

The function of the Xeelee ship was to optimize the chances of survival of its human occupants.

It studied the purposeless emptiness stretching around it and considered how this might be achieved.

Gas clouds, dark and cooling, reached to the limits of this expanding Universe. There were no stars. There was no evidence of intelligence, or life.

The ratio of helium to hydrogen here was about twenty-five percent. This, and various other cosmological relics, told the Xeelee ship that this Universe had emerged from its singularity in a broadly similar fashion to that of the Universe of its origin, with comparable ratios between the fundamental forces.

This, of course, was good.

The semisentient ship was capable of independent speculation. Perhaps some property of the Ring had guided them to an inhabitable environment, the ship wondered.

It did not spend much processing time on such theorizing. After all, speculation was not its primary function; and even if it were, there was no one to report back to.

So the Universe was broadly similar to that once shared by humans and Xeelee. With one important difference.

It was much younger.

Less than a billion years had passed since the singularity here. No stars yet burned. There was virtually no iron, no carbon, no silicon — no oxygen. Save for the helium and a few traces of more complex elements which had emerged from the singularity, there was only hydrogen. All the heavy elements would become abundant much later, when true stars began to shine and complex fusion processes in their cores got underway.

There were no Earths to land the humans on, no air for them to breathe, no metals for them to dig.

The ship unfurled its night-dark wings and dived into the hydrogen clouds. Cherry-red starbreaker beams blasted ahead of the ship; the gravity waves lanced through convection cells billions of miles wide, and a cylinder of roiling hydrogen-helium gathered. Within the cylinder temperatures rose by millions of degrees and complex fusion chains, comparable to those in the cores of the stars yet to form, were initiated.

A cascade of heavy elements emerged from the fires, and at last even a few atoms of iron were formed.

For three months the Xeelee ship patrolled the length of its creation; it passed its beautiful wings through the star-core cylinder, filtering out the heavy elements.

At last the Xeelee ship was ready to construct an Earth.

The heart of it was a core of iron seven thousand miles wide. Leaving the core at stellar-surface temperatures the ship now laid down a mantle of silicate rocks, constructed from the mineral banks it had built up, and overlaid the whole with a thin crust of oxygen and silicon. Next — compressing billions of years of planetary evolution into weeks — it deposited lodes of iron, bronze, tin, methane at suitably accessible points. There was even uranium. Then riverbeds, ocean floors, fjords were gouged out by the flickering of a cherry-red beam.

The process was creative; the ship almost enjoyed it.

After six months the bones of the planet were laid down. The ship landed at various points on the surface and, by firing refrigerating particle beams into the glowing sky, rapidly cooled the crust through thousands of degrees.

Next, ice asteroids were smashed into the bare surface, as were lodes of frozen oxygen and nitrogen. The ice melted and flowed into the waiting sea beds; gases hissed into a cloak about the planet.

All this took two more months; but at last the ship’s night-dark wings cruised over clear oceans, through crisp blue oxygen.

The first clouds formed. Rain fell.

Next it was time to establish an ecosystem.

The ship had never visited Earth, or even the interior of the box-world its Xeelee designers had built for the humans. But it knew the general principles.

The ship’s clay was the genetic material of its human occupants, and their various parasites and symbiotes. Tiny laboratories embedded in the ship’s hull labored for many days.

The first priority was an oxygenating flora. The ship chose melanin, the ta

Rainforests exploded across the new continents, oceans of banyanlike trees force-grown by the ship. And a kind of plankton spread like a brown stain through the seas. Flows of energy and matter were initiated through the new biosphere, with life, climate and geology combining in a single grand organism, turning the infant planet into an autonomous, self-regulating life-support mechanism with a life span of millions of years.