“No. I want more than that. I want you to support me.”

“Why? To make you feel good?”

“No. Because you’ll bring with you good people, like Enduring Hope and Cohl.”

“I’ll think about it—”

“Crap. Tell me now, or walk away.”

Blue, staring boldly at him, shook his head. “You speak to me that way. But you’ve no idea what I’ve seen here. None at all.”

“Give me an answer.”

The silence stretched. Pila sat silently, evidently fascinated, as the two halves of Pirius, locked together by fate and mutual loathing, faced each other down.

Eventually Pirius Blue agreed. Pirius Red always knew he would, though the two of them would fight all the way to Chandra. After all, that was what he would have done himself.

As Blue turned to go, Red stopped him. “We’re going to have to learn to get along. We’ll always have seventeen years of our lives in common.”

“So what?” Blue snapped. “That’s the past.”

“Aren’t you going to ask about her?”

Blue’s back stiffened. “Who?”

“Torec. Come on, Blue. We need to talk it over.”

Blue shrugged. “There’s nothing to talk about. She’s your Torec. Mine is—lost, in a timeline that’s never going to exist. You get used to it.” And he walked out.

Chapter 43

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 antiquarks. 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.