humans were divided into two antagonistic factions, and, as usual, wanted to reduce the potential for trouble. Also, they had checked all vehicles, found little food in the Voloshins', and had put them in with us for the long journey. The Bugs were harsh, but fair. John said that, and I laughed, remembering an old joke.
A conversation stopper, though, was what Yuri told us about the Cube. He thrashed the subject about with Oni over a four-day period, then called a conference. Here's what he said:
'If I can make any sense out of what Oni has been telling me, the Cube is one of the strangest objects in the universe.' He laughed. 'Odd choice of words, as you'll see in a moment. And strictly speaking, it's not an object in the conventional sense. It's made of almost nothing at all… literally nothing at all. What it is, is a space. A space within a space. The space without is our universe, our continuum. The one within is…' He scratched his beard and hunched up his shoulders. 'Another space.'
'Are you saying there's a universe in there?' John asked.
Yuri sat back in his seat and shoved his hands into his pockets. 'It may be no more than a light-year across.'
'Only a light-year,' Susan gasped, then fanned her face with her hand in mock relief. 'You had me worried there for a minute.'
'How can that possibly be?' John demanded. 'You mean it's been… shrunk?'
'Folded,' Yuri said. 'Most likely. Folded and refolded along many dimensions.' He withdrew his hand and turned his pocket inside out. 'Think of it this way.' He made a fold in the pocket.
'Now, keep tying this up, rolling it up, and fairly soon you can't put your hand in anymore. But the pocket still exists, doesn't it?'
'I see,' John said. 'I think.'
'Now, all this is pure speculation on the part of the Ahgirr scientists.'
'What are they basing it on then?' I asked.
'The stream of raw data that seems to be coming out of the Cube. I can't imagine what can be supplying that data, or perhaps it's just energy that becomes data when it gets out. It's in the form of some very exotic radiation, part of it. And the other part is simple radio signals.'
'So,' I said, 'this universe is losing energy.'
'Yes. Now, at first blush the data doesn't seem to make much sense at all. It didn't to the Ahgirr until somebody made the association and looked in a cosmology text. The values coming out, and the states of energy within the Cube that the values seem to imply, correspond very closely to what cosmologists think existed in the very early stages of formation of our universe.'
'You mean the Big Bang?' Darla asked, amazed.
'No, long before the Big Bang. Before there was any matter at all, and very little energy. Almost none of that either.' He swung around in the driver's seat toward his lifecompanion. 'Neither of us are really qualified in this area, but Zoya has had more exposure to the subject than I'
Zoya sighed. 'I don't know where to begin.' She smiled thinly, then said, 'Let me put it this way. In the field of theoretical physics, the last century was spent wrestling with some very basic subjects. Among them was the fundamental nature of matter itself. Absurdly simplified, the current concensus is that matter is space tied up in knots. Vortices, matrices, call them what you will…' She scowled and scratched her forehead. 'No, let's try that again. Think of a state of affairs in which…' She thought a moment. 'Can you imagine a cloud of mathematical points arranging themselves by random processes into a pattern that may define a geometrical space? Coming together out of absolute nothingness, purely by chance? And can you imagine this defined space, this completely empty metrical frame, undergoing evolutionary changes, random fluctuations which induce a knotting up of itself at certain discrete points? Now imagine the knots as little blobs of energy. And since matter is equivalent to energy' She held up a palm. 'Please. As I said, this is absurdly simplified. But do you understand me so far? What I'm describing is nothing less than how the universe could have come to be created out of nothing.'
'And that,' Yuri said, 'is what the Ahgirr scientists think is going on inside the Black Cube. At any rate, that is their best guess.'
We listened to the howl of the slipstream for a while.
'It's almost unfathomable,' John said.
'Quite so,' Yuri agreed. 'Quite so.'
'I think it's a neat idea,' Susan said. 'A Universe Egg.' She looked around at everybody, grinning delightedly. 'That's what the Cube is. An incubating universe.'
'I wonder if it's ours,' Roland mused.
Another week went by.
Then another.
The days were featureless, colorless, distinguishable only by the random shape some snippet of conversation or tiny event gave them. I recall a few.
One day, Susan said to me:
'I know you still love Darla. I know it has nothing to do with the baby either. You two are… I don't know. Destined for something. It's bigger than both of you.' She crinkled her nose. 'That sounds ridiculously overdramatic. I really don't know how to put it.'
I asked, 'Is this Susan the Teleological Pantheist speaking?'
She put a hand behind my neck, tilted my head down, and kissed me. 'This is Susan speaking, who loves you.'
And another day Darla made some little joke over breakfast, a passing remark that struck us both funny?I can't recall what exactly?and we laughed as we hadn't done in a long time. And when we were done her face was bright and her cheeks glowed and her eyes looked lovely, the tiny highlights in them like sparks from a cheery hearth-fire.
And Lori making me feel old when she said I reminded her a bit of her grandfather, who had raised her until she was five, and whom she vividly remembered. (When pressed, she admitted her grandfather had been only around thirty-eight when she was born.)
And the fight the Voloshins had over a toothbrush. With their personal effects still in their vehicle, they had lacked certain necessities. Liam had made toothbrushes for both of them, handles whittled from firewood, brushes made ingeniously out of stiff plastic thread from some undisclosed source. Yuri had lost his and Zoya refused to share hers, berating him for being so careless. They didn't speak for three days.
One of Moore's men calling on the skyband, God knows why, or why he thought anybody here would want to talk with him?Krause I think it was, but maybe not?wanting to know how our food was holding out. I asked how theirs was holding out. He said it was getting low. I told him I sincerely hoped what they had left was growing botulism. He thanked me and signed off. He didn't call again.
Susan and Darla had a reconciliation, of sorts, an unspoken one. Susan delivered a typical wisecrack and Darla laughed. Susan looked at her tentatively, then they both laughed. Still, they maintained a warily respectful distance between them.
Ragna saying, 'Ah, Jake, friend of mine, I am wearily contemplating the continuation of this merte of the bull.'
John spending an hour with the Cube in the palm of his hand, staring at it, then suddenly looking up at me. 'Is it possible?' he asked. 'Could it be possible?'
I didn't answer.
One day I walked into the cab to find Roland at his favorite post, staring out into an alien night.
'Jake, come and look at this.'
I sat in the driver's seat. 'What's up?'
'Look at the sky.'
I did. There were very few stars, and on one side of the sky, there didn't seem to be any.
'We're on the edge of a galaxy,' Roland said. He pointed to his right. 'Over here is intergalactic space. Nothingness. Now look over to where the stars are. See the glowing cloud behind them? The disk-edge of the galaxy.'
I saw and agreed.
'We've been hitting these planets regularly. Sometimes there are a few stars on the other side and it's hard to tell. But this planet belongs to a star right on the very edge of its galaxy.'
