There was no place. There was no time. A human observer would have recognized nothing here:
no mass, energy, or force. There was only a rolling, random froth whose fragmented geometry
constantly changed. Even causality was a foolish dream.


The orderly spacetime with which humans were familiar was suffused with vacuum energy, out
of which virtual particles, electrons and quarks, would fizz into existence, and then scatter or
annihilate, their brief walks upon the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this
extraordinary place whole universes bubbled out of the froth, to expand and dissipate, or to
collapse in a despairing flare.


This chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of nonbeing where whole universes clustered
in reefs of foamy spindrift, was suffused by a light beyond light. But even in this cauldron of
strangeness there was life. Even here there was mind.

Call them monads.


This would be the label given them by Commissary Nilis, when he deduced their existence. But
the name had much deeper roots.


In the seventeenth century the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz had imagined that
reality was constructed from pseudo-objects that owed their existence solely to their relation to
each other. In his idea of the "monad," Leibniz had intuited something of the truth of the
creatures who infested this domain. They existed, they communicated, they enjoyed a richness of
experience and community. And yet "they" didn't exist in themselves; it was only their
relationships to each other that defined their own abstract entities.


No other form of life was possible in this fractured place.


Long ago they had attended the birth of a universe.


It had come from a similar cauldron of realities, a single bubble plucked out of the spindrift. As
the baby universe had expanded and cooled, the monads had remained with it. Immanent in the
new cosmos, they suffused it, surrounded it. Time to them was not as experienced by the
universe's swarming inhabitants; their perception was like the reality dust of configuration space,
perhaps.


But once its reality had congealed, once the supracosmic froth had cooled, the monads were
forced into dormancy. Wrapped up in protective knots of spacetime, they dreamed away the long
history of their universe, with all its empires and wars, its tragedies and triumphs. It had been the
usual story—and yet it was a unique story, for no two universes were ever quite the same. And
something of this long saga would always be stored in the monads' dreaming.


The universe aged, as all things must; within, time grew impossibly long and space stretched
impossibly thin. At last the fabric of the universe sighed and broke—and a bubble of a higher
reality spontaneously emerged, a recurrence of the no-place where time and distance had no
meaning. Just as the universe had once been spawned from chaos, so this droplet of chaos was
now born from the failing stuff of the universe. Everything was cyclic.


And in this bubble, where the freezing of spacetime was undone, the monads awoke again; in
their supracosmic froth, they were once more briefly alive.




The monads considered the bubbling foam around them.


They dug into a reef of spindrift, selected a tangle of possibilities, picked out one evanescent
cosmic jewel. This one—yes. They closed around it, as if warmed by its glow of potentialities.


And, embedding themselves in its structure, they prepared to shape it. The monads enriched the
seedling universe with ineffable qualities whose existence few of its inhabitants would even
guess at.


The new universe, for all its beauty, was featureless, symmetrical—but unstable, like a sword
standing on its point. Even the monads could not control how that primordial symmetry would be
broken, which destiny, of an uncountable number of possibilities, would be selected.


Which was, of course, the joy of it.


For the inhabitants of this new cosmos, it began with a singularity: a moment when time began,
when space was born. But for the monads, as their chaotic Ur-reality froze out once more into a
rigid smoothness, the singularity was an end: for them, the story was already over. Encased in
orderly, frozen spacetime, they would slumber through the long ages, until this universe in turn
grew old and spawned new fragments of chaos, and they could wake again.


But all that lay far in the future.


There was a breathless instant. The sword toppled. Time flowed, like water gushing from a tap.


History began.


The balancing sword tipped and fell. The primordial simplicity of the new universe was lost.
From the broken symmetry of a once-unified physics, two forces emerged: gravity, and a force
humans would call the GUT force—"GUT" for Grand Unified Theory, a combination of
electromagnetic and nuclear forces. The separating-out of the forces was a phase change, like
water freezing to ice, and it released energy that immediately fed the expansion of the seedling
universe.


Gravity's fist immediately clenched, crushing knots of energy and matter into black holes. It was
in the black holes' paradoxical hearts that the sleeping monads huddled. But the black holes were
embedded in a new, unfolding spacetime: three dimensions of space and one of time, an orderly
structure that congealed quickly out of the primitive chaos.


Yet there were flaws. The freezing-out had begun spontaneously in many different places, like
ice crystals growing on a cold window. Where the crystals met and merged, discontinuities
formed. Because the spacetime was three-dimensional, these defects were born in two
dimensions, as planes and sheets—or one dimension, as lines of concentrated energy scribbled
across spacetime's spreading face—or no dimensions at all, simple points.


Suddenly the universe was filled with these defects; it was a box stuffed with ribbons and strings
and buttons.


And the defects were not inert. Propagating wildly, they collided, combined, and interacted. A
migrating point defect could trace out a line; a shifting line could trace out a plane; where two
planes crossed, a line was formed, to make more planes and lines. Feedback loops of creation
and destruction were quickly established, in a kind of spacetime chemistry. There was a time of
wild scribbling.


Most of these sketches died as quickly as they were formed. But as the networks of interactions
grew in complexity, another kind of phase shift was reached, a threshold beyond which certain
closed loops of interactions emerged—loops which promoted the growth of other structures like
themselves. This was autocatalysis, the tendency for a structure emerging from a richly
connected network to encourage the growth of itself, or copies of itself. And some of these loops
happened to be stable, immune to small perturbations. This was homeostasis, stability through
feedback.


Thus, through autocatalysis and homeostasis working on the flaws of the young spacetime, an
increasingly complex hierarchy of self-sustaining structures emerged. All these tangled knots
were machines, fundamentally, heat engines feeding off the flow of energy through the universe.
And the black holes, drifting through this churning soup, provided additional points of structure,
seeds around which the little cycling structures could concentrate. In the new possibilities opened
up by closeness, still more complex aggregates grew: simple machines gathered into cooperative
"cells," and the cells gathered into colonial "organisms" and ultimately multicelled "creatures"...


It was, of course, life. All this had emerged from nothing.


In this universe it would always be this way: structures spontaneously complexified, and
stability emerged from fundamental properties of the networks—any networks, even such
exotica as networks of intersecting spacetime defects. Order emerging for free: it was wonderful.
But it need not have been this way.

Deep in the pinprick gravity wells of the primordial black holes, the feeding began.




The universe inhabited by the spacetime-defect fauna was quite unlike that of humans. There
was no light, for instance, for the electromagnetic force which governed light's propagation had
yet to decouple from the GUT superforce. But the spacetime-flaw creatures, huddled around
their black holes, could "see" by the deep glow of the gravity waves that crisscrossed the
growing cosmos.


To them, of course, it had always been this way; to them the sky was beautiful.


The basis of all life in this age was the chemistry of spacetime defects, an interconnected
geometric churning of points and lines and planes. Most life-forms were built up of "cells,"
tightly interconnected, and very stable. But more complex creatures, built from aggregates of
these cells, were not quite so stable. They were capable of variation, one generation to the next.


And where there is variation, selection can operate.


On some of the black-hole "worlds," fantastic ecologies developed: there were birds with wings
of spacetime, and spiders with arms of cosmic string, even fish that swam deep in the twisted
hearts of the black holes. "Plants" passively fed on energy flows, like the twisting of space at the
event horizons of the black holes, and "animals," exploiters, fed on those synthesizers in turn—
and other predators fed onthem. Everywhere there was coevolution, as species adapted together
in conflict or cooperation: "plants" and "animals," "flowers" and "insects," parasites and hosts,
predators and prey. Some of this—the duets of synthesizers and exploiters, for instance—had
echoes in the ecologies with which humans were familiar. But there were forms like nothing in
human experience.


The creatures of one black hole "world" differed from the inhabitants of another as much as
humans would differ from, say, Silver Ghosts. But just as humans and Ghosts were both
creatures of baryonic matter who emerged on rocky planets, so the inhabitants of this age,
dominated by its own dense physics, had certain features in common.


All life-forms must reproduce. Every parent must store information, a genotype, to pass on to its
offspring. From this data is constructed a phenotype, the child's physical expression of that
information—its "body."


In this crowded young universe the most obvious way to transmit such information was through
extended quantum structures. Quantum mechanics allowed for the long-range correlation of
particles: once particles had been in contact, they were never truly separated, and would always
share information.


Infants were budded, unformed, from parents. But each child was born without a genotype. It
was unformed, a blank canvas. A mother would read off her own genotype, and send it to her
newborn daughter—by touch, by gravity waves. In the process, depending on the species, the
mother's data might be mixed with that of other "parents."

But there was a catch. This was a quantum process. The uncertainty principle dictated that it was
impossible to clone quantum information: it could be swapped around, but not copied. For the
daughter to be born, the mother's genotype had to be destroyed. Every birth required a death.

To human eyes this would seem tragic; but humans worked on different assumptions. To the
spacetime fauna, life was rich and wonderful, and the interlinking of birth and death the most
wonderful thing of all.

As consciousness arose, the first songs ever sung centered on the exquisite beauty of
necrogenesis.



As the young universe unfolded, some of the spacetime-chemistry races developed high
technologies. They ventured from their home "worlds," and came into contact with each other.
Strange empires were spun across galaxies of black holes. Terrible wars were fought.


Out of the debris of war, the survivors groped their way to a culture that was, if not unified, at
least peaceable. A multispecies federation established itself. Under its benevolent guidance new
merged cultures propagated, new symbiotic ecologies arose. The endless enrichment of life
continued. The inhabitants of this golden time even studied their own origins in the brief
moments of the singularity. They speculated about what might have triggered that mighty
detonation, and whether any conscious intent might have lain behind it.


Time stretched and history deepened.


It was when the universe was very old indeed—ten billion times as old as it had been at the
moment of the breaking of its primordial symmetry—-that disaster struck.


Light itself did not yet exist, and yet lightspeed was embedded in this universe.


At any given moment, only a finite time had passed since the singularity, and an object traveling
at lightspeed could have traversed only part of the span of the cosmos. Domains limited by
lightspeed travel were the effective "universes" of their inhabitants, for the cosmos was too
young for any signal to have been received from beyond their boundaries. But as the universe
aged, so signals propagated further—and domains which had been separated since the first
instant, domains which could have had no effect on each other before, were able to come into
contact.


And as they overlapped, life-forms crossed from one domain into another.


For the federation, the creatures that suddenly came hurtling out of infinity were the stuff of
nightmare. These invaders came from a place where the laws of physics were subtly different:
the symmetry-breaking which had split gravity from the GUT superforce had occurred
differently in different domains, for they had not been in causal contact at the time. That
difference drove a divergence of culture, of values. The federation valued its hard-won
prosperity, peace, and the slow accumulation of knowledge. The invaders, following their own
peculiar imperatives, were intent only on destruction, and fueling their own continuing
expansion. It was like an invasion from a parallel universe. Rapprochement was impossible.

The invaders came from all around the federation's lightspeed horizon. Reluctantly, the
federation sought to defend itself, but a habit of peace had been cultivated for too long;
everywhere the federation fell back. It seemed extinction was inevitable.


But one individual found a dreadful alternative.


Just as the cosmos had gone through a phase change when gravity had separated from the GUT
force, so more phase changes were possible. The GUT force itself could be induced to dissociate
further. The energy released would be catastrophic, unstoppable, universal—but, crucially, it
would feed a new burst of universal expansion.


The homelands of the invaders would be pushed back beyond the lightspeed horizon.


But much of the federation would be scattered too. And, worse, a universe governed by a new
combination of physical forces would not be the same as that in which the spacetime creatures
had evolved. It would be unknowable, perhaps unsurvivable.


It was a terrible dilemma. Even the federation was unwilling to accept the responsibility to
remake the universe itself. But the invaders encroached, growing more ravenous, more
destructive, as they approached the federation's rich and ancient heart. In the end there was only
one choice.


A switch was thrown.



A wall of devastation burned at lightspeed across the cosmos. In its wake the very laws of
physics changed; everything it touched was transformed.


The invaders were devastated.


The primordial black holes survived—and, by huddling close to them, so did some
representatives of the federation.


But the federation's scientists had not anticipated how long this great surge of growth would
continue. With the domain war long won, the mighty cosmic expansion continued, at rates
unparalleled in the universe's history. Ultimately, it would last sixty times the age of the universe
at its inception, and it would expand the federation's corner of spacetime by a trillion, times a
trillion, times a trillion, times a trillion. Human scientists, detecting the traces of this great burst
of "inflation," the single worst catastrophe in the universe's long history, would always wonder
what had triggered it. Few ever guessed it was the outcome of a runaway accident triggered by
war.

As the epochal storm continued the survivors of the federation huddled, folding their wings of
spacetime flaws over themselves. When the gale at last passed, the survivors emerged into a new,
chill cosmos. So much time had passed that they had changed utterly, and forgotten who they were,
where they had come from. But they were heirs of a universe grown impossibly huge—a
universe all of ten centimeters across.



The monstrous swelling of the age of inflation was over.


The universe continued to expand, more sedately than before, but relentlessly. Still phase
changes occurred, as the merged forces broke up further, and with each loss of symmetry more
energy was injected into the expansion.


The release of the electromagnetic force from its prison of symmetry was particularly
spectacular, for suddenly it was possible for light to exist. The universe lit up in a tremendous
flash—and space filled immediately with a bath of searing radiation. So energetically dense was
this first exuberant glow that it continually coalesced into specks of matter—quarks and
antiquarks, electrons and positrons—that would almost as rapidly annihilate each other. There
were no atoms yet, though, no molecules. Indeed, temperatures were too high for the quarks to
combine into anything as sedate as a proton.


The primordial black holes, surviving from the age of spacetime chemistry, again provided some
structure in this seething chaos; passing through the glowing soup they would gather clusters of
quarks or anti-quarks. Though the quarks themselves continually melted away, the structure of
these clusters persisted; and in those structures were encoded information. Interactions became
complex. Networks and loops of reactions formed, some were reinforced by feedback loops.


Certain consequences inevitably followed. For this universe it was already an old story—but it
was a new generation of life.


But this was a universe of division. For every particle of matter created there was an antimatter
twin. If they met they would mutually annihilate immediately. It was only chance local
concentrations of matter, or antimatter, that enabled any structures to form at all.


In these intertwined worlds of matter and antimatter, parallel societies formed. Never able to
touch, able to watch each other only from afar, they nevertheless made contact, exchanging
information and images, science and art, reciprocally influencing each other at every stage.
Mirror-image cultures evolved, each seeking to ape the achievements of the unreachable other.
There were wars too, but these were always so devastating for both sides that mutual deterrence
became the only possible option. Even a few impossible, unrequitable parity-spanning love
affairs were thrown up.


The fundamental division of the world was seen as essentially tragic, and inspired many stories.

The various matter species, meanwhile, were not the only inhabitants of this ferocious age. They
shared their radiation bath with much more ancient life-forms. To the survivors of the spacetime-
chemistry federation, this age of an endless radiation storm was cold, chill, empty, the spacetime
defects which characterized their kind scattered and stretched to infinity. But survive they had.
Slowly they moved out of their arks and sought new ways to live.


Among the cultures of matter and antimatter, clinging to their evanescent quark-gluon islands in
a sea of radiation, a crisis approached.


As the universe cooled, the rate of production of quarks and anti-quarks from the radiation soup
inevitably slowed—but the mutual destruction of the particles continued at a constant rate.
Scientists on each side of the parity barrier foresaw a time when no more quarks would coalesce
—and then, inevitably,all particles of matter would be annihilated, as would the precisely equal
number of particles of antimatter, leaving a universe filled with nothing but featureless,
reddening light. It would mean extinction for their kinds of life; it was hardly a satisfactory
prospect.


Slowly but surely, plans were drawn up to fix this bug in the universe. At last an empire of
matter-cluster creatures discovered that it was possible to meddle with the fundamental
bookkeeping of the cosmos.

Human scientists would express much of their physics in terms of symmetries: the conservation
of energy, for instance, was really a kind of symmetry. And humans would always believe that a
certain symmetry of a combination of electrical charge, left- and right-handedness, and the flow
of time could never be violated. But now quark-gluon scientists dug deep into an ancient black
hole, which had decayed to expose the singularity at its heart. The singularity was like a wall in
the universe—and by reaching through this wall the quark scientists found a way to violate the
most fundamental symmetry of all.


The imbalance they induced was subtle: for every thirty million antimatter particles, thirty
million and one matter particles would be formed—and when they annihilated, that one spare
matter particle would survive.


The immediate consequence was inevitable. When the antimatter cultures learned they were to
be extinguished while their counterparts of matter would linger on, there was a final, devastating
war; fleets of opposing parity annihilated each other in a bonfire of possibilities.


Enough of the matter cultures survived to carry through their program. But it was an anguished
victory; even for the victors only a fraction could survive.


Another metaphorical switch was pulled.

Across the cooling cosmos, the mutual annihilation continued to its conclusion. When the storm
of co-destruction ceased, when all the antimatter was gone, there was a trace of matter left over.
Another mystery was left for the human scientists of the future, who would always wonder at the
baffling existence of an excess of matter over antimatter.


Yet again the universe had passed through a transition; yet again a generation of life had
vanished, leaving only scattered survivors, and the ruins of vanished and forgotten civilizations.
For its few remaining inhabitants the universe now seemed a very old place indeed, old and
bloated, cool and dark.


Since the singularity, one millionth of a second had passed.



The universe was expanding at half the speed of light. It was small and ferociously dense, still
many times as dense as an atomic nucleus.


At least quarks were stable now. But in this cannonball of a cosmos the matter familiar to
humans, composed of protons and neutrons—composites of quarks, stuck together by gluons—
could not yet exist. There were certainly no nuclei, no atoms. Instead, space was filled with a
soup of quarks, gluons and leptons, light particles like electrons and neutrinos. It was a
"quagma," a magma of quarks, like one immense proton.


As time wore inexorably away, new forms of life rose in the new conditions.


The now-stable quarks were able to combine into large assemblies; and as these assemblies
complexified and interacted, the usual processes of autocatalysis and feedback began. The black
holes were still there to provide structure, but larger clumps of matter also served as a stratum for
life's new adventures, and there was energy for free in the radiation bath that still filled the
universe.


Among the new kinds, ancient strategies revived. There were exploiters and synthesizers.
"Plants" fueled their growth with radiant energy—but there were no stars yet, no suns; rather the
whole sky glowed. "Animals" evolved to feed off these synthesizers, and learned to hunt each
other.


As always the variation in life-forms across the cosmos was extraordinarily wide, but most
shared certain basics of their physical design. Almost all of them stored information about
themselves in their own complicated structures, rather than in an internal genetic data store, as
humans one day would: for these creatures their genotypewas their phenotype, as if they were
made wholly of DNA.


Their way of communicating would have seemed ferocious to a human. A speaker would
modify its listener's memories directly, by firing quagma pellets into them; it was a message
carried in a spray of bullets. They even reproduced rather like DNA molecules. They opened out
their structures, like flowers unfolding, and constructed a mirror-image version of themselves by
attracting raw material from the surrounding soup of loose quarks. These "quagmites" were not
quite like the creatures humans would one day encounter in the Galaxy's Core, but they were
their remote ancestors.


There was little in common in the physical basis of human and quagmite; a quagmite was not
much bigger than an atomic nucleus. But the largest of the quagma creatures were composed of a
similar number of particles to the atoms which would comprise a human body. So humans and
quagmites were comparable in internal complexity, and their inner lives shared a similar
richness. Many humans would have appreciated the best quagmite poetry—if they could have
survived being bombarded by it.


Meanwhile, the quagmite creatures shared their universe with older forms of life.

The ancient spacetime-chemistry creatures, having survived yet another cosmic transition,
gradually found ways to accommodate themselves to the latest climate, even though to them it
was cold and dark and dead. In their heyday there had been no "matter" in the normal sense. But
now they found they could usefully form symbiotic relationships with creatures formed of
condensate matter: extended structures locked into a single quantum state. A new kind of being
ventured cautiously through the light-filled spaces, like insects with "bodies" of condensate and
"wings" of spacetime defects. It was the formation of a new kind of ecology, emerging from
fragments of the old and new. But symbiosis and the construction of composite creatures from
lesser components were eternal tactics for life, eternal ways of surviving changed conditions.


In the unimaginably far future humans would call the much-evolved descendants of these
composite forms "Xeelee."

The proto-Xeelee were, meanwhile, aware of another species of matter born out of this turbulent
broth. This would one day be called dark matter by human scientists, for it would bond with
other types of matter only loosely, through gravity and the weakest nuclear force. There was a
whole hierarchy of particles of this stuff, even a sort of chemistry. This faint stuff passed through
the quark-cluster cities and the nests of the proto-Xeelee alike as if they didn't exist. But it was
there—and, like the Xeelee, this dark matter was going to be around for good.



As the endless expansion continued, the quagmites swarmed through their quagma broth,
fighting and loving and dying. The oldest of them told their legends of the singularity. The young
scoffed, but listened in secret awe.


It seemed to the quagmites that the ages that had preceded their own had been impossibly brief,
a mere flash in the afterglow of the singularity. But it was a common error. The pace of life
scaled to temperature: if you lived hot, you lived fast. The quagmites did not suspect that the
creatures who had inhabited earlier, warmer ages had crammed just as many experiences—just
as much "life"—into their brief instants of time. As the universe expanded, every generation,
living slower than the last, saw only a flash of heat and light behind it, nothing but a cold dark
tunnel ahead—-and each generation thought that it was only now that a rich life was possible.

The comfortable era of the quagmites couldn't last forever; nothing ever did. It was when the
universe was thirty times older than it was at the end of the matter-antimatter conflict that the
first signs of the quagmites' final disaster were detected.

The trouble started in the most innocuous, most mundane of ways: problems with waste.


For many quagmite kinds, eliminated waste was in the form of compressed matter, quarks and
gluons wadded together into baryons—protons and neutrons. You could even find a few simple
nuclei, if you dug around in there. But the universe was still too hot for such structures to be
stable long, and the waste decayed quickly, returning its substance to the wider quagma bath.


Now, as the universe cooled, things changed. The mess of sticky proton-neutron cack simply
wouldn't dissolve as readily as it once had. Great clumps of it clung together, stubbornly
resistant, and had to be broken up to release their constituent quarks. But the energy expenditure
was huge.


Soon this grew to be an overwhelming burden, the primary task of civilizations. Citizens voiced
concerns; autocrats issued commands; angry votes were taken on councils. There were even wars
over waste dumping. But the problem only got worse.


And, gradually, the dread truth was revealed.
The cooling universe was approaching another transition point, another phase change. The
ambient temperature, steadily falling, would soon be too low to force the baryons to break up—
-and the process of combination would be one way. Soon all the quarks and gluons, the
fundamental building blocks of life, would be locked up inside baryons.


The trend was inescapable, its conclusion staggering: this extraordinary implosion would wither
the most bright, the most beautiful of the quagmite ecologies, and nobody would be left even to
mourn.


As the news spread across the inhabited worlds, a cosmic unity developed. Love and hate, war
and peace were put aside in favor of an immense research effort to find ways of surviving the
impending baryogenetic catastrophe.

A solution was found. Arks were devised: immense artificial worlds, some as much as a meter
across, their structures robust enough to withstand the collapse. It was unsatisfactory; the
baryogenesis could not be prevented, and almost everything would be lost in the process. But
these ships of quagma would sail beyond the end of time, as the quagmites saw it, and in their
artificial minds they would store the poetry of a million worlds. It was better than nothing.


As time ran out, as dead baryons filled up the universe and civilizations crumbled, the quagma
arks sailed away. But mere survival wasn't enough for the last quagmites. They wanted to be
remembered.


The universe was now about the size of Sol system, and still swelling.
And even before baryogenesis was complete, another transition was approaching. The new
baryons gathered in combinations of two, three, four, or more. These were atomic nuclei—-
although nothing like atoms, with their extended clouds of electrons, could yet exist; each
nucleus was bare.


These simple nuclei spontaneously formed from the soup of protons and neutrons, but the
background radiation was still hot enough that such clusters were quickly broken up again. That
would soon change, though: just as there had been a moment when matter could no longer
evaporate back to radiant energy, and a moment when quarks no longer evaporated out of
baryons, soon would come a time when atomic nuclei became stable, locking up free baryons.
This was nucleosynthesis.

For the last quagmites, huddled in their arks, it was hard to imagine any form of life that could
exploit such double-dead stuff, with quarks locked inside baryons locked inside nuclei. But from
a certain point on, such nuclear matter must inevitably dominate the universe, and any life that
arose in the future would be constructed of it.


The quagmites wanted to be remembered. They had determined that any creatures of the remote
future, made of cold, dead, nuclear stuff, would not forget them. And they saw an opportunity.


At last the moment of nucleosynthesis arrived.


The universe's prevailing temperature and pressure determined the products of this mighty
nucleus-baking. Around three-quarters of the nuclei formed would be hydrogen—simple protons.
Most of the rest would be helium, combinations of four baryons. Any nuclei more complex
would be—-ought to be—vanishingly rare; a universe of simple elements would emerge from this
new transition.


But the quagmites saw a way to change the cosmic oven's settings.


The fleet of arks sailed through the cosmos, gathering matter with gauzy magnetic wings. Here a
knotted cloud was formed, there a rarefied patch left exposed. They worked assiduously,
laboring to make the universe a good deal more clumpy than it had been before. And this
clumpiness promoted the baking, not just of hydrogen and helium nuclei, but of a heavier
nucleus, a form of lithium—three protons and four neutrons. There was only a trace of it
compared to the hydrogen and helium; the quagmites didn't have enough power to achieve more
than that. Nevertheless there was too much lithium to be explained away by natural processes.


The scientists of the ages to follow would indeed spot this anomalous "lithium spike," and
would recognize it for what it was: a work of intelligence. At last cold creatures would come to
see, and the quagmite arks would begin to tell their story. But that lay far in the future.





With the subatomic drama of nucleosynthesis over, the various survivors sailed resentfully on.
There were the last quagmites in their arks, and much-evolved descendants of the spacetime-
condensate symbiotes of earlier times yet, all huddling around the primordial black holes. To
them the universe was cold and dark, a swollen monster where the temperature was a mere
billion degrees, the cosmic density only about twenty times water. The universe was practically a
vacuum, they complained, and its best days were already behind it.


The universe was three minutes old.




The impoverished universe expanded relentlessly.


Space was filled with a bath of radiation, reddening as the expansion stretched it, and by a thin
fog of matter. Most of this was dark matter, engaged in its own slow chemistry. The baryonic
matter—"light" matter—was a trace that consisted mostly of simple nuclei and electrons. Any
atoms that formed, as electrons hopefully gathered around nuclei, were immediately broken up
by the still-energetic radiation. Without stable atoms, no interesting chemistry could occur. And
meanwhile the ionic mist scattered the radiation, so that the universe was filled with a pale,
featureless glow. The cosmos was a bland, uninteresting place, endured with resentment by the
survivors of gaudier eras.


Nearly four hundred thousand years wore away, and the universe inflated to a monstrous size,
big enough to have enclosed the Galaxy of Pirius's time.


Then the epochal cooling reached a point where the photons of the radiation soup were no
longer powerful enough to knock electrons away from their nuclear orbits. Suddenly atoms,
mostly hydrogen and helium, coalesced furiously from the mush of nuclei and electrons.
Conversely, the radiation was no longer scattered: the new atomic matter was transparent.


The universe went dark in an instant. It was perhaps the most dramatic moment since the birth
of light itself, many eras past.


To the survivors of earlier times, this new winter was still more dismaying than what had gone
before. But every age had unique properties. Even in this desolate chill, interesting processes
could occur.


The new baryonic atoms were a mere froth on the surface of the deeper sea of dark matter. The
dark stuff, cold and gravitating, gathered into immense wispy structures, filaments and bubbles
and voids that spanned the universe. And baryonic matter fell into the dark matter's deepening
gravitational wells. There it split into whirling knots that split further into pinpoints, that
collapsed until their interiors became so compressed that their temperatures matched that of the
moment of nucleosynthesis.


In the hearts of the young stars, nuclear fusion began. Soon a new light spread through the
universe. The stars gathered into wispy hierarchies of galaxies and clusters and superclusters, all
of it matching the underlying dark matter distribution.


Stars were stable and long-lasting fusion machines, and in their hearts light elements were baked
gradually into heavier ones: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen. When the first stars died, they scattered
their heavy nuclei through space. These in turn were gathered into a second generation of stars,
and a third—and from this new, dense material still more interesting objects formed, planets with
rocky hearts, that swooped on unsteady orbits around the still-young stars.


In these crucibles life evolved.


Here, for instance, was the young Earth. It was a busy place. Its cooling surface was dotted with
warm ponds in which a few hundred species of carbon-compound chemicals reacted furiously
with each other, producing new compounds which in turn interacted in new ways. The networks
of interactions quickly complexified to the point where autocatalytic cycles became possible,
closed loops which promoted their own growth; and some of these autocatalytic cycles chanced
upon feedback processes to make themselves stable; and, and...


Autocatalysis, homeostasis, life.


Shocked into awareness, humans mastered their environment, sailed beyond the planet of their
birth, and wondered where they had come from.

It seemed to the humans that the ages that had preceded their own had been impossibly brief, a
mere flash in the afterglow of the singularity, and they saw nothing but a cold dark tunnel ahead.
They thought that it was only now that a life as rich as theirs was possible. It was a common
mistake. Most humans never grasped that their existence was a routine miracle.


But they did learn that this age of stars was already declining. The peak of star formation had
come, in fact, a billion years before the birth of Earth itself. By now more stars were dying than
were being born, and the universe would never again be as bright as it had in those vanished
times before.


Not only that, humans started to see, but other forces were at work to accelerate that darkening.


For humans, the universe suddenly seemed a dangerous place.




In this age of matter the proto-Xeelee found new ways to survive. Indeed, they prospered. They
formed new levels of symbiosis with baryonic-matter forms. The new form—a composite
of three ages of the universe—-was the kind eventually encountered by humans, who would come
to call them by a distorted anthropomorphic version of a name in an alien tongue: they were, at
last, Xeelee.


But soon the new Xeelee faced an epochal catastrophe of their own.


They still relied on the primordial black holes, formed in the earliest ages after the singularity;
they used the holes' twisted knots of spacetime to peel off their spacetime-defect "wings," for
instance. But now the primordial holes were becoming rare: leaking mass-energy through
Hawking radiation, they were evaporating. By the time humanity arose, the smallest remaining
holes were the mass of the Moon.


It was devastating for the Xeelee, as if for humans the planet Earth had evaporated from under
their feet.


But a new possibility offered itself. New black holes were formed from the collapse of giant
stars, and at the hearts of galaxies, mergers were spawning monsters with the mass of a million
Sols. Here the Xeelee migrated. The transition wasn't easy; a wave of extinction followed among
their diverse kind. But they survived, and their story continued.


And it was the succor of the galaxy-center black holes that first drew the Xeelee into contact
with dark matter.




There was life in dark matter, as well as light.


Across the universe, dark matter outweighed the baryonic, the "light," by a factor of six. It
gathered in immense reefs hundreds of thousands of light-years across. Unable to shed heat
through quirks of its physics, the dark material was resistant to collapse into smaller structures,
the scale of stars or planets, as baryonic stuff could.


Dark and light matter passed like ghosts, touching each other only with gravity. But the pinprick
gravity wells of the new baryonic stars were useful. Drawn into these wells, subject to greater
concentrations and densities than before, new kinds of interactions between components of dark
matter became possible.


In this universe, the emergence of life in dark matter was inevitable. In their earliest stages,
these "photino birds" swooped happily through the hearts of the stars, immune to such
irrelevances as the fusion fire of a sun's core.


What did disturb them was the first stellar explosions—-and with them the dissipation of the
stars' precious gravity wells, without which there would be no more photino birds.


Almost as soon as the first stars began to shine, therefore, the photino birds began to alter stellar
structures and evolution. If they clustered in the heart of a star they could damp the fusion
processes there. By this means the birds hoped to hurry a majority of stars through the
inconvenience of explosions and other instabilities and on to a dwarf stage, when an aging star
would burn quietly and coldly for aeons, providing a perfect arena for the obscure dramas of
photino life. A little later the photino birds tinkered with the structures of galaxies themselves, to
produce more dwarfs in the first place.

Thus it was that humans found themselves in a Galaxy in which red dwarf stars, stable, long-
lived and unspectacular, outnumbered stars like their own sun by around ten to one. This was
hard to fit into any naturalistic story of the universe, though generations of astrophysicists
labored to do so: like so many features of the universe, the stellar distribution had been polluted
by the activities of life and mind. It would not be long, though, before the presence of the
photino birds in Earth's own sun was observed.


The Xeelee had been troubled by all this much earlier.


The Xeelee cared nothing for the destiny of pond life like humanity. But by suppressing the
formation of the largest stars, the birds were reducing the chances of more black holes forming.
What made the universe more hospitable for the photino birds made it less so for the Xeelee. The
conflict was inimical.

The Xeelee began a grim war to push the birds out of the galaxies, and so stop their tinkering
with the stars. The Xeelee had already survived several universal epochs; they were formidable
and determined. Humans would glimpse silent detonations in the centers of galaxies, and they
would observe that there was virtually no dark matter to be observed in galaxy centers. Few
guessed that this was evidence of a war in heaven.


But the photino birds turned out to be dogged foes. They were like an intelligent enemy, they
were like a plague, and they were everywhere; and for some among the austere councils of the
Xeelee there was a chill despair that they could never be beaten.


And so, even as the war in the galaxies continued, the Xeelee began a new program, much more
ambitious, of still greater scale.


Their immense efforts caused a concentration of mass and energy some hundred and fifty
million light-years from Earth's Galaxy. It was a tremendous knot that drew in galaxies like
moths across three hundred million light-years, a respectable fraction of the visible universe.
Humans, observing these effects, called the structure the Great Attractor—-or, when one of them
journeyed to it, Bolder's Ring.


This artifact ripped open a hole in the universe itself. And through this doorway, if all was lost,
the Xeelee planned to flee. They would win their war—or they would abandon the universe that
had borne them, in search of a safer cosmos.

Humans, consumed by their own rivalry with the Xeelee, perceived none of this. To the Xeelee
—as they fought a war across hundreds of millions of light-years, as they labored to build a
tunnel out of the universe, as stars flared and died billions of years ahead of their time—humans,
squabbling their way across their one Galaxy, were an irritant.


A persistent irritant, though.