Pirius frowned. “You’re saying that the Friends are a Ghost cult?”
“Perhaps not as crude as that. But Ghost philosophy is the most interesting element in the whole volatile mix of this new creed.
“Humans fought Ghosts for long enough, and earlier we worked with them, too. Perhaps humans swapped beliefs with Ghosts. And if that’s so, perhaps the Friends may be the first interstellar religion, the first to fuse the traditions of two species. . . . The Ultimate Observer could plausibly be a Ghost deity!”
Pirius frowned. “No human would follow a Ghost.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure, Pilot. People have followed more bizarre beings in the past, though they were mostly imaginary!” He sipped an invisible drink, not reproduced in the Virtual. “One has to wonder, though, if some such encounter as this wasn’t in the mind of that Ghost up there all the time—perhaps we have been given the gravastar technology as a ploy, so that the Ghosts can achieve their own ends, whatever they are. I suppose the great mixing-up that Project Prime Radiant is inflicting on the orderly pools of the Coalition is a good opportunity for subversion. . . . I always did intend that we should shake up history, you and I. But one must wonder what great oaks might grow from the seeds we are planting today.”
Pirius didn’t like the sound of any of that. It sounded too much like the paranoia Nilis had criticized him for before. With a curt command, he shut down unnecessary chatter on the loops; the conversation between Ghost and Friend immediately stopped.
The little flotilla sailed on, huddling behind its wall of distorted spacetime, with only formal technical communications passing between the ships.
Chapter 47
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.