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Chapters (43)
  1. Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter
  2. Foreword
  3. Eve
  4. PART 1 ERA: Expansion
  5. The Sun-People
  6. The Logic Pool
  7. Gossamer
  8. Cilia-of-Gold
  9. Lieserl
  10. PART 2 ERA: Squeem Occupation
  11. Pilot
  12. The Xeelee Flower
  13. More Than Time or Distance
  14. The Switch
  15. PART 3 ERA: Qax Occupation
  16. Blue Shift
  17. The Quagma Datum
  18. Planck Zero
  19. PART 4 ERA: Assimilation
  20. The Godel Sunflowers
  21. Vacuum Diagrams
  22. PART 5 ERA: The War to End Wars
  23. Stowaway
  24. The Tyranny of Heaven
  25. Hero
  26. PART 6 ERA: Flight
  27. Secret History
  28. PART 7 ERA: Photino Victory
  29. Shell
  30. The Eighth Room
  31. The Baryonic Lords
  32. C.A.D. 500,000,000
  33. Epilogue
  34. The Xeelee Sequence-Timeline
  35. Permissions
  36. About the Author
  37. Notes
  38. 1
  39. 2
  40. 3
  41. 4
  42. 5
  43. 6

Some argued that access to Xeelee technology damaged human inventiveness. It was too easy to take rather than build.

But not all exploration was finished. And, in the course of that exploration, evidence was unturned -- fragmentary and incomplete -- of a technology even older than the Xeelee...

The Quagma Datum

The Quagma Datum

A.D. 5611

The soup was cold. I pushed it away. "Tell me why I'm here."

Wyman didn't answer until the next course arrived. It was a rich coq au vin. He forked it into his mouth with an enthusiasm that told me he hadn't always been accustomed to such luxury. Earthlight caught the jewelry crusted over his fingers.

Faintly disgusted, I lifted my eyes to the bay window behind him. Now that we'd left the atmosphere the Elevator Restaurant was climbing its cable more steeply. The Sahel ground anchor site had turned into a brown handkerchief, lost in the blue sink of Earth.

Suddenly the roof turned clear. Starlight twinkled on the cutlery and the table talk ebbed to silence.

Wyman smiled at my reaction.

"Dr. Luce, you're a scientist. I asked you here to set you a scientific puzzle." His accent was stilted, a mask for his origins. "Did you read about the lithium-7 event? No? A nova-bright object fifteen billion light years away; it lasted about a year. The spectrum was dominated by one element. Doctor, the thing was a beacon of lithium-7."

A floating bottle of St. Emilion refilled my glass.

I thought about it. "Fifteen billion years is the age of the Universe. So this object went through its glory soon after the Big Bang."

Thin fingers played with coiffed hair. "So, Doctor, what's the significance of the lithium?"

"Lithium-7 is a relic of the early Universe. A few microseconds after the singularity the Universe was mostly quagma -- a magma of free quarks. Then the quarks congealed into nuclear particles, which gathered into the first nuclei.

"Lithium-7 doesn't form in stars. It was formed at that moment of nucleosynthesis. So all this points to an early Universe event."

"Good," he said, as if I'd passed a test.

Our empty plates sank into the table.

"So what's this got to do with me? I hate to disappoint you, Wyman, but this isn't my field."