But in their epochal sleep, even the monads could be drawn into history. And even they could be harmed.

Chapter 58

Luru Parz watched the Commissary with blank hostility, Enduring Hope with bafflement.

Nilis tried to tell his complex story too quickly, too briefly. For months he had been trying to assemble all the data on Chandra that he could find: on the Xeelee and quagmites and other denizens, on cosmological data like the relic Big Bang radiation, on the astrophysics of the black hole itself and the knotted-up singularity at its heart—and now even on the extraordinary artifact the Xeelee had wrapped around the event horizon. And he had come to a new conclusion.

Nilis said triumphantly, “Do you see? Do you see now?”

“No,” snapped Kimmer.

There was a story in this information, said Nilis. And that story was the secret history of the universe.

Nilis said he had looked deep into the structure of Chandra, and had found life infesting even the singularity at its heart. “These deep ones—the ones I call monads; it is a very antique word—they are older than all of us. Older than the Xeelee, older than the universe itself! It will take a lot of study to figure it all out. But it’s clear that the monads are responsible for life in this universe. Or rather for the tendency of this universe to complexify, to produce life. It is a level of deep design about the universe nobody ever suspected. And in their nests of folded spacetime, huddled inside the event horizons of black holes, they slumber—waiting for our petty ages to pass away—until the time comes for a new universe to be born from the wreckage of the old.”

“And the Xeelee—”

“They live off Chandra, the black hole. Their net structure is the great machine which allows them to achieve their goals: to birth nightfighters, to use the black hole as a computing engine, all of it. But that’s trivial. It’s what’s inside the black hole that counts. The Xeelee are just parasites. Secondary. They don’t matter!”

Kimmer said dangerously, “They matter rather a lot to me.”

Enduring Hope thought he understood. “And if we attack the black hole,” he said doggedly, “we could destroy the monads. Is that what you fear?”

“Yes,” Nilis said gratefully, sweat beading his brow. “Oh, my boy—yes! That is precisely what I fear.”

Kimmer said, “But even if you are right, there are other galaxies. Other nests of monads.”

Nilis insisted, “We can’t make any simple assumptions about this situation, Marshal.” He spoke rapidly about levels of reality, of interconnectivity in higher dimensions. “By striking a blow in this one place we may wreak damage everywhere, and for all time. . . .”