The quantum functions connecting him to the site of man's original system stretched thin. Soon the human Galaxy shrank to a mote in the vast cathedral of space. He saw clusters and super clusters of galaxies, glowing softly, sprinkled over space in great filaments and sheets, so that it was as if the Universe were built of spiderweb.

On the largest of scales space was a froth of baryonic matter, a chaotic structure of threads and sheets of shining starstuff, separated by voids a hundred million light years across.

And everywhere, on both the small scale and the large, Paul found evidence of the work of intelligence, and in particular of the vast, unrestrained projects of the Xeelee. They had turned galaxies into neat balls of stars, and in one place they had caused two galaxy clusters -- whole clusters! -- to collide, in order to create a region a million light years wide in which matter was nowhere less dense than in the outer layers of a red giant star.

Paul wondered what manner of creatures moved through that vast sea...

And everywhere he traveled Paul found the premature aging of stars.

Paul's anger stirred, illogically.

Cautiously, clinging to his wave-function ropes, Paul sank into the dark matter ocean.

Currents of photinos swept past him. The moving masses distorted space-time, and the density was high enough for him to perceive vast structures gliding through his focus of awareness. Gradually he came to understand the structure of his Universe.

Dark matter comprised most of the mass of the Universe. Baryons -- protons and neutrons, the components of light, visible matter -- and photinos -- their dark matter analogues -- existed largely independently of each other, interacting only through gravitational attraction.

All matter, dark and light, had erupted from the singularity at the start of time which had forced space itself to unfurl like a torn sheet. The dark matter had spread like some viscous liquid into every corner of the young Universe and, seething, settled into a kind of equilibrium. The baryons had been sprinkled like a froth over this sea.

At first the dark ocean was featureless, save only for variations in its smooth density. These glitches, representing mass concentrations on the order of millions of solar masses, formed gravitational wells, cosmic potholes into which fragments of light matter fell, pooled, and began to coalesce. Gravitational warming began, and -- finally, fitfully -- the first stars sputtered to brightness. A billion years after the singularity the galaxies formed, trapped like flies in the dark matter wrinkles.

Slowly dark currents pushed the galaxies together, and large-scale structures -- the vast, gaudy superstructure that would span the Universe -- began to evolve.