“Gramm is going to say yes—he’s going to back us. Of course he has to get the decision from his committee. But if he backs it, it will be hard for any of them not to follow along. We’re going to the Core, Ensign. We’re going to have our squadron.” Nilis padded around his room, plucking at his fingers.

Pirius shook his head. “Then why aren’t you leaping with joy, Commissary?”

“Because they’ve called my bluff,” he said rapidly. He seemed terrified. “While I was pushing against a locked door it was easy to be bold. But now the door has swung open, and I have to deliver on my promises.” He turned to Pirius. “Oh, my eyes, my eyes! What have I done? Pirius, what have I done?”

Part 3

THREE

Genetically, morphologically, I am indistinguishable from an inhabitant of Earth of the long dark ages that preceded spaceflight.

I rejoice. For that changelessness is what makes me human.

Let others tinker with their genotypes and phenotypes, let them speciate and bifurcate, merge and blend. We unmodified humans are a primordial force who will sweep them all aside.

It must be this way. It will avail us nothing if we win a Galaxy and lose ourselves.

—Hama Druz

Chapter 35

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.