Ring

She grunted in reply to Louise.

It was Spi

She loosened her restraints and looked around — and found herself staring into intergalactic emptiness. In the distance were patches of muddy light which could have been galaxies, or clusters of galaxies — so remote that even at the ’fighter’s immense speed of three million light-years a day, she could make out no discernible movement.

Spi

Louise — watching, Spi

“We have?”

“After ten days, we’ve come thirty million light-years from Sol. Spi

Spi

“Oh, come on, Spi

“But I can’t see any of it, Louise,” Spi

Louise was silent for a moment. Then she said, “All right, Spi

A ball of brilliant white light, expanding rapidly to about a foot across, appeared a few yards in front of the ’fighter cage.

Spi

“Bear with me, Spi

“The temperature is still too high for atoms to form. So the baryonic matter forms a plasma. But plasma is quite opaque to radiation, so the pressure of the radiation stops the matter from clumping together. There are no stars, no planets, no galaxies.”

Abruptly the Virtual Universe expanded to double its size, and turned clear; a flash of light flooded out over Spi

“Now the temperature has fallen below three thousand degrees,” Louise said. “Suddenly the electrons can combine with nuclei, to form atoms — and atoms don’t interact strongly with photons. So the Universe is transparent for the first time, Spi

“But the key point is, Spi

The model Universe was now a cloud of swarming, jostling particles.

“It looks like a mist,” Spi

“Right. Think of it as like a dew, Spi

Spi

The ball of mist was filled, now, by a fine tracery of lines; the toy Universe looked like a cracked, glass sphere. “Here’s the web, Spi

“I know about string,” Spi

“Right. But these strings formed naturally. They are remnants of the phase transitions of the early Universe, remnants left over after the decomposition of the GUT unified super-force which came out of the singularity… Cosmic strings are residual traces of the ultrahigh, symmetric vacuum of the GUT epoch, embedded in the ‘empty space’ of our Universe — like residual lines of liquid water in solid ice. And the strings are superconducting; as they move through the primordial magnetic fields, huge currents of a hundred billion billion amps or more — are induced in the strings…”

The strings writhed, like slow, interco

“It’s beautiful,” Spi

“The strings are moving at close to lightspeed,” Louise said. “They leave behind them flat wakes — planes toward which matter is attracted, at several miles a second. Structure starts to form in the wakes, so we get a pattern of threads and sheets of baryonic matter surrounding voids…” Now the baryonic matter, coalescing around the string structure, imploded under its own gravity. Tiny Virtual galaxies — charming, gem-like — twinkled to life, threaded along the webbing of cosmic string.

“And there’s more,” Louise said. “Look at this.”

Now there was a loop of cosmic string, twisting in space and oscillating wildly.

“String loops can form, when strings cross each other,” Louise said. “But they’re unstable. When loops form they decay away rapidly… unless they are stabilized, as the Xeelee have made stable their nightfighter wings. Now: remember I told you that the strings are superconducting threads, carrying immense electrical currents? When the strings decay, all that electromagnetic energy has to go somewhere…”

Abruptly the loop shrank, precipitately, and once again light blasted into Spi

Spi

“Sorry. But watch, Spi

Spi

The explosion of the loop of string had blown out a huge hole, in the middle of the mesh of galaxy threads.

Spi

“Not quite,” Louise said. “Spi

“Spi

“I get the idea,” Spi

“The baryonic matter is clustered in filaments and sheets, around huge voids filled only with dark matter. It’s like a froth, Spi