I started to understand. "You think that if you can show the photino birds how to build star-sized objects of dark matter -- without using the cores of baryonic stars -- they will stop destroying the stars."

"That is the goal. The dream, if you will."

"And the great Xeelee war can stop, and we'll all coexist; we'll live together, photino birds and Xeelee and humans and Ghosts, like one huge family." I felt like laughing at it. "Lethe, Ambassador. At least you Ghosts can't be faulted for thinking big."

"Now," it said, "you must understand why your opposition to this project must be withdrawn. On the success of this experiment, the future of the cosmos could hinge."

I looked up at the engineered moon. There was a sense of mistiness about it, as if a great liquid lens had gathered over that pulverized surface; the light of the Galaxy was refracted, shimmering and softened. I stared into the dark matter mist, hunting for structure.

"It is working," the Ghost said. "The photinos are coalescing. Soon, the equilibrium oscillations will be induced..."

A trickle of data started whispering in my head. Interpolations and feedback from my datastores, Eve's Notebooks. Shadowy Virtuals glimmered around me: schematics of the moon, the photino star the Ghosts were building, little charts of growth rates, density-time fluctuations.

There was something odd. The projections of the soliton star's formation -- based on human mathematics -- didn't match up with what the Ghost had told me...

But I was still preoccupied with my hardening suspicions. I thought about prophecy.

Humans had built Michael Poole's wormhole, and benefited from the fragments of data it had delivered: data from the ends of time. Perhaps the Ghosts, and other races, had achieved similar glimpses of the future.

But all such glimpses are fragmentary and incomplete.

Prophecy is possible using scientific laws, where sufficiently simple events are concerned: the eclipse of a sun, or the return of a long-period comet. And prophecy based in the more complex human arena has been used, after a fashion, for most of humanity's recorded history. My Notebooks told me about actuarial tables, devices for predicting death rates, that even predated human spaceflight. The more computing power is available, the more detailed a prophecy is possible.

To spin out a future vision as detailed and granular as the one I'd been vouchsafed by Eve must have required computing power an order of magnitude more powerful than anything available to humanity.

Or to the Ghosts.

All at once the Ghosts were rich in processing power.

Suddenly, I saw it.

"You let it out," I accused the Ambassador.

"Jack Raoul--"

"You let it out. The Planck Zero AI. You released it."

"It proved possible to accelerate the production of Hawking radiation, the natural evaporation of the black hole within which the AI was contained, which--"