Vacuum Diagrams

We popped out of Susy-space, sparkling with selectrons and neutralinos.

My time in that metal box had seemed a lot longer than ten days. I don’t remember a lot of it. I’d been locked inside my head, looking for a place to hide from the oppression of distance, from the burden of looming death.

Now I breathed deeply; even the canned air of the pod seemed sweet out of Susy-space.

I checked my status. I’d have four days’ life support at the lithium-7 site. It would expire — with me — just when the Ghosts arrived. Wyman had given me the bare bones.

I de-opaqued my window and looked out. I was spinning lazily in an ordinary sky. There was a powdering of stars, a pale band that marked a galactic plane, smudges that were distant galaxies.

Earth was impossibly far away, somewhere over the horizon of the Universe. I shivered. Damn it, this place felt old.

There was something odd about one patch of sky. It looked the size of a dinner plate at arm’s length. There were no stars in the patch. And it was growing slowly.

I set up the monitors. “sWyman — what is it?”

“All I see is a dull infra-red glow… But that’s where the lithium object is hiding, so that’s the way we’re headed.”

The patch grew until it hid half the sky.

I started to make out a speckled effect. The speckles spread apart; it was as if we were falling into a swarm of bees. Soon we reached the outskirts of the swarm. A hail of huge objects shot past us and began to hide the stars behind us—

“They’re ships.”

“What?”

I straightened up from my monitor. “Ships. Millions of ships, sWyman.”

I swung the focus around the sky. I picked out a little family of cylinders, tumbling over each other like baby mice. There was a crumpled sphere not much bigger than the pod; it orbited a treelike structure of branches and sparkling leaves. Beyond that I made out bundles of spheroids and tetrahedra, pencils of rods and wands — my gaze roved over a speckling of shape and color.

I was at the heart of a hailstorm of ships. They filled the sky, misting into the distance.

But there was no life, no purposeful movement. It was a desolate place; I felt utterly alone.

I looked again at the tree-thing. The delicate ship was miles wide. But there were scorch marks on the leaves, and holes in the foliage bigger than cities.

“sWyman, these are wrecks. All of them.”

A motion at the edge of my vision. I tried to track it. A black, birdlike shape that seemed familiar—

“Luce, why the junk yard? What’s happened here?”

I thought of a shell of lithium-stained light growing out of this place and blossoming around the curve of the Universe. At its touch flocks of ships would rise like birds from the stars… “sWyman, we’re maybe the first to travel here from our Galaxy. But races from further in, closer to this event, have been flooding here from the start. As soon as the lithium-7 light reached them they would come here, to this unique place, hoping as we hope to find new understanding. They’ve been seeking the lithium treasure for billions of years… and dying here. Let’s hope there’s still something worth dying for.”

Something was growing out of the speckled mist ahead. It was a flattened sphere of blood-colored haze; starlight twinkled through its substance.

It was impossible to guess its scale. And it kept growing.

“sWyman. I think that’s another ship. It may not be solid… but I know we’re going to hit. Where’s my intrasystem drive?”

“Fifteen billion light years away.”

There was detail in the crimson fog, sparks that chattered around rectangular paths. Now the huge ship shut off half the sky.

“Lethe.” I opaqued the window.

There was a soft resistance, like a fall into a liquid. Red light played through the pod walls as if they were paper. Sparks jerked through right angles in the air.

Then it was over. I tried to steady my breath.

“Why worry, Michael?” sWyman said gently. “We’ve no power; we’re ballistic. If another of those babies runs into us there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

“It’s getting clearer up ahead.”

We dropped out of the mist of ships and shot into a hollow space the size of the Solar System. On the far side was another wall of processed matter — more ships, I found. There was a sphere of smashed-up craft clustering around this place like gaudy moths.

And the flame at the heart of it all?

Nothing much. Only a star. But very, very old…

Once it had been a hundred times the mass of our sun. It had squirted lithium-7 light over the roof of the young cosmos. It had a terrific time. But the good days passed quickly. What we saw before us was a dried-up corpse, showing only by its gravity signature.

Just an old star… with something in orbit around it.

I focused my instruments. “That thing’s about a foot across,” I recorded. “But it masses more than Jupiter…”

The monstrous thing crawled past the surface of its wizened mother, raising a blood-red tide.

“So what? A black hole?”

I shook my head. “The densities are wrong. This is a different ball game, sWyman. That stuff’s quagma.”

The largest piece of quagma I’d had to work with before had been smaller than a proton. This was my field, brought within miraculous reach. I stammered observations—

Things started to happen.

The quagma thing veered out of orbit and shot towards us. I watched in disbelief. “It’s not supposed to do that.”

I felt a tingle as it hurtled past, mere yards from my window. It looked like a lump of cooling charcoal. Its gravity field slapped the pod as if it were a spinning top, and centripetal force threw me against the wall.

Clinging to the window frame I caught a glimpse of the quagma object whirling away from the pod and neatly returning to its orbit.

Then a shadow fell across the window.

“That’s shot us full of all sorts of funny stuff,” shouted sWyman. “Particles you wouldn’t believe, radiation at all wavelengths—”

I didn’t reply. There was a shape hovering out there, a night-dark bird with wings hundreds of miles across.

“Xeelee,” I breathed. “That’s what I saw in the ship swarm. The Xeelee are here. That’s a nightfighter—”

sWyman roared in frustration.

The Xeelee let us have it. I saw the exterior of the window glow cherry-red; gobbets melted and flew away. The Xeelee dipped his wings, once; and he flew away.

Then the window opaqued.

Something hit my head in the whirling darkness. The noise, the burning smells, sWyman’s yelled complaints — it all faded away.

“…Damn those Xeelee. I should have known they can beat anything we’ve got. And of course they would police this lithium beacon. It wouldn’t do to let us lesser types get our hands on stuff like this; oh no…”

I was drifting in a steamy darkness. There was a smell of smoke. I coughed, searched for a coffee globe. “At least the Xeelee attack stopped that damn rotation.” sWyman shut up, as if cut off. “What’s our status, sWyman?”

“Nothing that counts is working. Oh, there’s enough to let us interpret the quagma encounter… But, Luce, the inseparability packet link is smashed. We can’t talk to home.” Cradling the cooling globe I probed at my feelings. There was despair, certainly; but over it all I felt an unbearable shame.

I’d let my life be stolen. And, in the end, it was for nothing.

sWyman hissed quietly.

“How’s the life support, by the way?” I asked.

“What life support?”

I let the globe join the cabin’s floating debris and felt my way to the opaqued window. It felt brittle, half-melted. It would stay opaqued forever, I realized.

“sWyman. Tell me what happened. When that quagma droplet lunged out of its orbit and sprayed us.”

“Yeah. Well, the particles from the quagma burst left tracks like vapor trails in the matter they passed through.” I remembered how that invisible shower had prickled. The scars laced everything — the hull, the equipment, even your body. And the tracks weren’t random. There was a pattern to them. There was enough left working in here for me to decipher some of the message…”

I felt my skin crawl. “A message. You’re telling me there was information content in the scar patterns?”

“Yes,” said sWyman casually. I guess he’d had time to get used to the idea. “But what we can’t do is tell anyone about it.”

I held my breath. “Do you want to tell me?”

“Yeah…”

It was less than a second after the Big Bang.

Already there was life.

They swarmed through a quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. The oldest of them told legends of the singularity. The young scoffed, but listened in secret awe.

But the quagma was cooling. Their life-sustaining fluid was congealing into cold hadrons. Soon, the very superforce which bound their bodies would disintegrate.

They were thinking beings. Their scientists told them the end of the world, seconds away, would be followed by an eternal cold. There was nothing they could do about it.

They could not bear to be forgotten.

So they built… an ark. A melon-sized pod of quagma containing all their understanding. And they set up that unmistakable lithium-7 flare, a sign that someone had been here, at the dawn of time.

For trillions of seconds the ark waited. At last cold creatures came to see. And the ark began to tell its story.

I floated there, thinking about it. The scars lacing the pod — even my body — held as much of the understanding of the quagma creatures as they could give us. If I could have returned home