‘What then?’ Spinner asked. ‘What do we do when New Sol goes out?’
Morrow smiled. ‘Then, I guess, we move on: to another star, and another, and another . . . We have time here to work that out, I think, Spinner-of-Rope.’
Now New Sol was rising again, over the lip of the pod. The four of them turned instinctively to the light, its flat whiteness smoothing the lines of age and fatigue in their faces.
‘In fact,’ Mark said, ‘the star we’ve chosen - New Sol - is already well past its middle age. It’s probably got no more than three-quarters of a million years of its life left.’
Spinner frowned. ‘That seems stupid. Why not choose a young star, and move there while we can? It may be that when New Sol dies we won’t be
able
to move away.’
‘No,’ Mark said patiently. ‘Spinner, we
need
an older star.’
The star called New Sol was nearing the end of the
second
phase of its existence. In the first, it had burned hydrogen into helium. Now, helium was fusing in turn, and a rain of more complex elements had formed a new, inner core: principally oxygen, but also neon, silicon, carbon, magnesium and others.
And later, in the third phase of its life, when the oxygen started to burn, the star would die . . . although
how
was far from certain.
‘Terrific,’ Spinner said. ‘And we die with it.’
‘No,’ Mark said seriously. ‘Spinner-of-Rope, we die
without
it. Don’t you get it? New Sol is full of
oxygen
. . .’
Morrow was pointing, excitedly. ‘Look.
Look
. There’s the wormhole . . . I think it’s almost time.’
Louise turned in her seat.
Now a new form emerged over the rotating pod’s horizon: the familiar shape of a wormhole Interface. This Interface was only a hundred yards across - far smaller than the mile-wide monster the
Northern
had hauled across a different spacetime - but, like its grander cousins of the past, it shared the classic tetrahedral frame, the shining electric blue colour of its exotic matter struts, and the autumn-gold glimmering of its faces. A dozen drone scoop-ships prowled around the Interface, patient, waiting.
Louise felt a prickle of tears in her eyes; she brushed them away impatiently.
Already
, she thought,
we are building things here. Already, we are engineering this universe.
Mark said to Spinner, ‘If there were planets here we could land and try to terraform one. But there
are
no planets for us to land on.
Anywhere
. This is a very young universe. There are no more than traces of heavy elements here, anywhere, outside the interior of the protostars. There are no moons, no comets, no asteroids . . . We have no raw materials to build with, save the hulk of the
Northern -
save what we brought here ourselves. We can’t even renew our atmosphere.’
Morrow nodded. ‘So,’ he said, ‘we’re mining the star.’
The second terminus of this wormhole had been dropped into the carcass of New Sol. Lieserl had accompanied the Interface - just as once she had travelled into the heart of Sol itself. Soon, enriched gases from the heart of the new star would pour into space -
here
, far from the heat of New Sol, accessible.
The scoop-ships had mouths constructed of electromagnetic fields which could gather in the star-dust across volumes of millions of cubic miles. When the wormhole started to operate, the scoops would sift out the few grains of precious heavy elements.
‘The first priority is atmospheric gases,’ Mark said. ‘We lost a lot of our recyclable reserve during the string impact. Another blow-out like that and we’d be finished.’
‘Are all the gases we need there, inside the star?’
‘Well, there’s plenty of oxygen, Spinner,’ Louise said. ‘But that’s not enough. An all-oxygen atmosphere isn’t particularly stable - it’s too inflammable. We need a neutral buffer gas, to contribute to the hundreds of millibars of pressure we need to stay alive.’
‘Like nitrogen,’ Spinner said.
‘Yes. But there isn’t much nitrogen in New Sol. We should be able to use neon, though . . .’
‘We can replace our other stores. Use the oxygen to make water and food.’
‘We can do more than that, Spinner-of-Rope,’ Mark said. ‘In the longer term we can extract heavier elements: magnesium, silicon, carbon - maybe even iron. They are only present in traces in New Sol, but they’re
there
. We can build a fleet of
Northerns
, if we’re patient enough. Why, we can even make rocks.’
Spinner looked out at New Sol, and the point light glittered in her eyes, making her look very young, Louise thought. Spinner said, ‘It’s chilling to think that - except maybe for the Xeelee - we’re
alone
here, in this universe. Stars like this once burned in our Universe - but they were all extinguished, destroyed, long before humans became conscious.
‘We may survive for millions of years here. But, finally, we’ll be gone. New Sol, and all these other stars, will destroy themselves. Eventually, a new generation of stars will form in the enriched galaxies - stars like Sol. And, I guess, intelligence will arise here . . .
‘But not for billions of years after we’re gone.’
Spinner turned to Louise, her eyes large, her expression fragile, troubled. Her hands tugged at each other’s fingers, and played with the arrow-head pendant at her chest. ‘Louise, nothing we build could survive such a length of time. No conceivable monument, or record, could persist. We’ll be forgotten. No one will ever know we were here.’
Louise reached over the back of her chair and took Spinner’s hands in hers, stilling their nervous motions. Again she felt a surge of responsibility for Spinner’s fragile state. ‘That’s not true, Spinner,’ she said gently. ‘We’ll still be there. These VMOs will leave traces in the microwave background - peaks of energy against the smooth radiation curves. There were traces like that in the microwave spectrum of our own Universe - that’s how we know of our own primordial VMOs. And there will be other traces, relics of this time. These giant proto-stars will enrich the substance of the young galaxies here, with heavy elements. Without the heavy elements stars like old Sol could never form . . . and we’ll be part of that enrichment, Spinner-of-Rope, tiny traces, atoms which formed in a different universe.’
Spinner-of-Rope frowned. ‘A blip in the microwave background? Is that to be our final monument?’
‘It might be sufficient to let the people of the future work out that we were here, perhaps. And besides, we might have a billion years ahead of us, Spinner. Time enough to think of something.’ She stroked Spinner’s hands. ‘It would take a long time, but we could
build
a planet for ourselves, out here on the lip of New Sol’s gravity well.’ She smiled. Maybe they could construct an ocean, wide enough for the
Great Britain
to sail again. What would old Isambard have made of that? And—
‘No,’ Morrow said mildly.
Louise turned to him, surprised. His face, gaunt, shaven of hair, was smooth and confident-looking in the light of New Sol.
‘What did you say?’ Louise asked.
He turned to her. ‘Planets are
inefficient
, Louise. Oh, they’re convenient platforms if they exist already. But - to
build
a planet? Why bury all that painfully extracted matter
inside
your habitable surface?’
Louise found herself frowning; she was aware of Mark grinning at her, irritatingly. ‘But what’s the alternative?’
Morrow said, ‘We can build structures in space: rings, hollow spheres - the point is to
maximize
the habitable surface available for a given mass - to spread it out as much as possible. Louise, a spherical planet gives you a
minimum
surface for a given mass.’
Louise studied Morrow curiously. His motion sickness was still evident in the pallor of his thin face, but he spoke with a vigour, a clarity she wouldn’t have believed possible when she’d first met him, soon after his emergence from the Decks. Was it possible that the centuries of oppression, of body and soul, which he had endured in there, were at last beginning to lift?
Mark smiled at her. ‘You’d better face it, Louise. You and I grew up on worlds, and so we think in terms of rebuilding what we’ve lost. We’d better move aside, and leave the future to these bright young kids.’
She found herself grinning back. She whispered, ‘Okay, I take your point. But -
Morrow
, as a bright young kid?’
‘Maybe we’ll just build ships,’ Spinner said intently. ‘Whole armadas of them. We can simply
fly
; who needs to land, anyway? We could spread out, here. Maybe the Xeelee are here already - we came through
their
gateway, after all. We could see if we can find them . . .’
Mark scratched his chin. ‘That’s a good agenda, Spinner-of-Rope. You know, I think Garry Uvarov would be proud of you.’
She glared at him. She pulled her hands away from Louise, and for a moment - with her streak of scarlet face paint, and spectacles glinting with New Sol light - Spinner reminded Louise of the savage little girl she’d once been.
‘Maybe he would,’ Spinner snapped. ‘But so what? I’m not a
creation
of Garry Uvarov. Uvarov was an oppressor, insane.’
Louise shrugged. ‘Perhaps he was, in the end - and capricious. But he was also insightful, iconoclastic. He never let us turn away from the truth, in any situation, no matter how uncomfortable that was . . .’
Uvarov hadn’t deserved to die, blind and alone, in a remote, deserted future. Maybe Uvarov had been right, too, in the motives behind his great eugenics experiment. Not in his methods, of course . . . But perhaps a natural, technology-independent immortality was a valid goal for the species.
Louise was aware that she and her crew had gone to a great deal of trouble to preserve the
essence
of humanity, through the collapse of the baryonic Universe. They hadn’t sent mere records of humankind through the Ring, or Virtual representations of what man had been: they’d brought
people
, with all their faults and ambiguities and weaknesses, and
plumbing
. And now that they’d succeeded, perhaps it was time for human stock to begin to develop: to face up to and exceed the limitations, of body and spirit, which had, at last, caused the extinction of humanity in the old, abandoned Universe.
She wondered if, in several generations’ time, the descendants of Spinner-of-Rope would indeed sail through this new universe in their sparkling ships. Perhaps when they finally met the Xeelee, it would be on equal terms; perhaps the new humans would be strong, immortal - and
sane.
‘ . . . It’s starting!’ Morrow said, his voice high and tense. He pointed, his sleeve riding up his arm. ‘Look at
that
.’
In a sudden eruption of light, gas blossomed from the four faces of the Interface. Still fusion-burning as it emerged, the gas rapidly expanded into a growing, cooling cloud. Louise could see the tetrahedral form of the Interface itself at the blazing heart of this animated sculpture of gas.
Diffuse light flooded the pod. It was as if a new, tiny star had ignited, here on the fringe of New Sol’s gravity well. The drones flickered open their electromagnetic scoops and moved into the glowing, dispersing clouds, browsing patiently.
‘Lethe’s waters,’ Morrow breathed. ‘It’s beautiful. It’s like a flower.’
‘More than that, Mark said with a grin. ‘It’s beautiful because it’s bloody
worked
.’ He turned to Louise, his blue eyes brilliant, and his face looked youthful and alive.
‘Louise,’ he said, ‘I think we might live through this after all.’
Louise reached for the pod’s controls. The first loads of atmospheric gases would be arriving soon. And there were homes to be built. It was time to return to the
Northern
and get back to work.
Life would go on, she thought: as complicated, and messy, and
precious
, as ever.
Once again Lieserl spread her arms and soared through the interior of a star. But now her playground was no mere G-type yellow dwarf like the Sun: this was
New Sol
- a supergiant, salvaged for her from the dawn of time, fully ten million miles across.
Lethe’s waters. I’d forgotten how wonderful this feels - how restrictive a human body could be . . .
I was born for this
, she thought.
She arced upwards towards the photosphere - the star’s surface was a wall of gas which seared space at a temperature of a hundred thousand degrees - and then she dived, yelling, down into the core. In Sol, the fusing core had been confined to the innermost few per cent of the diameter. Here, the core
was
the star, extending out almost to the photosphere itself. There was fusion burning
everywhere
. All around her helium burned into oxygen, dumping prodigious quantities of heat energy into the star’s opaque flesh. In response, immense convective cells - some of them large enough to have swallowed Sol itself - surged through the interior.
This star was no more than a couple of million years old. But already - to her intense regret - she’d missed one of the most interesting phases of its existence.
The star had formed as a ball of fusing hydrogen, two thousand times more massive than the Sun. There had been convection cells then, too, which had driven instabilities in the giant star; it had breathed, swelling and contracting through fully a tenth of its diameter in a day. The instabilities had grown, exponentially, resulting at last in the casting off of huge shells of material from the surface of the star, like a series of repeated nova explosions; the
Northern
had sailed in through those ancient shells, on its way to its orbit around the new sun.
Meanwhile, the helium core had grown, and steadily contracted, and heated up.
At last, the core reached half the mass of the original VMO - about a thousand Solar masses. And a shell of hydrogen around the core ignited.