Creation node, p.32
Creation Node, page 32
Terminus hovered silently.
Salma pressed. ‘Elizabeth, you said that these are very young stars, like the first stars in our universe. But the green – I thought it took billions of years for green life to evolve.’
‘Photosynthesis, yes. On Earth.’
Salma waved a hand. ‘So how come—’
‘How come those morning-of-the-universe stars have their light filtered through the green? Shit. Damn good question, Salma. I don’t know.’ Vasta seemed to be growing agitated. She turned to Terminus. ‘You are showing us these scenes. You want us to work this out for ourselves. Why, I don’t yet understand.’ She pointed accusingly at the sky, with one gloved hand. ‘Am I wrong? Am I mistaken that those stars are like the first stars to form in our universe?’
You are not mistaken. Like those stars.
‘Like them. Then it must follow that this universe is very young – probably not even a billion years old, compared to our universe of thirteen or fourteen billion years—’
You are mistaken.
‘Then what—’
The stars are young.
This universe is not young.
It is infinitely old.
And infinite in extent.
And Vasta just stared. At the sky, at the floating intelligence, at her companions.
At the impossibly young stars in an impossibly ancient universe.
‘Oh … I think …’
Then she crumpled, and fell back heavily on the ground.
Meriel hurried to Vasta. Doria followed, and got down on the ground beside her.
Feathers squealed with fear.
Salma held her tight. ‘Hush. You stay with me. It’s all right …’
Meriel snapped, ‘Lift her head. Just a little.’
Doria got down further and cradled Vasta’s head on her own outstretched arm.
Meriel tapped at a console on the chest panel of Vasta’s suit and interrogated it with barked commands.
Then she sat back on her haunches. ‘I think it’s just a faint. She’s overwrought. I think we all are.’ She glanced back at the floating ball that was Terminus up at the strange, brilliant, green-littered sky. ‘This has been too much. But I think she’ll be OK if we get her into the shelter, out of her suit for a while. Salma—’
‘On it.’ Salma let go of Feathers, pointed to their heap of gear, and, in the mime-and-sign language they had worked out over the years, hastily told Feathers that they had to put the shelter up. They broke away from the group and made for the equipment pile.
Looking back, Salma saw Vasta move a little, lift a hand. Salma heard a whisper, indecipherable, in her own suit’s system.
Meriel bent over Vasta and stared into Vasta’s faceplate. ‘What’s that, Elizabeth? Your voice is very faint …’
Salma heard Vasta draw in a ragged breath and say, ‘Infinitely old and infinite in extent my backside. What about Olbers’ paradox? Answer me that …’
And she fell back, as if succumbing to unconsciousness again.
38
The shelter erected itself on a verbal command, unfolding into a squat cylinder a couple of metres tall, perhaps five metres across. Two bulbous airlock assemblies stuck out from the sides, at opposite ends of a diameter.
With Salma, Feathers threw herself into the task of fixing all this up. Something they could understand, Salma thought. Something they could do.
When it was finished, Feathers hung back, to give Meriel and Doria the chance to lift Vasta through one of the airlocks. After that Salma and Feathers were asked to wait outside, for perhaps ten minutes, so they could get Vasta settled.
Ten long minutes, under that weird, gaudy sky, under the silent scrutiny of the hovering Terminus.
Salma knew they were both relieved when they were, at last, allowed into the shelter.
The airlock was fabric-walled, closet-sized. Once inside, the two of them had to wait a couple of minutes in their suits as they were bathed by invisible but sterilising radiation. Even after they had discarded their suits they had to go through scanners, and potentially more cleansing procedures if necessary. It seemed impossible that any life forms could survive on the planet outside to make it into the shelter, let alone infect humans, or even Feathers, and Feathers herself evidently did not carry any pathogens harmful to humans. But Salma had grown up knowing that ‘better safe than sorry’ was the basic mantra for all humans in space.
Still, it was a relief to make it into the shelter proper – a low roof, but a roomy space.
By now things had calmed, Salma saw. Vasta was sitting up, leaning against inflatable cushions propped up against the shelter wall, with blankets over her lap, and even a hot drink. Doria sat with her. Meriel was pacing, and quietly dictating notes into the air.
Feathers ran straight over to Vasta and gave her a hug. Salma followed more sedately.
Vasta grinned, lifted her drink out of the way, and hugged back. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine. I just got a little over-excited. System overload. Maybe I’m too old for this game – and all that zero gravity and cryosleep on the Cronus probably didn’t help.’ She stroked Feathers, curiously but tenderly. ‘But I’m better now. Thank you for the hug.’ She glanced at Salma. ‘Does she understand?’
‘She knows.’
And now Vasta called out more loudly, ‘I know it wasn’t your fault, Terminus. Can you hear me?’
I can.
A voice in the air, as if he – it? – were physically present in the shelter, Salma thought. A minor miracle that everybody reacted to with frowns and glances, then ignored – outwardly, at least.
Vasta went on, ‘Terminus, I can see that you’ve been trying to protect us from all of this. The conceptual shocks. And you’ve done it well. Show, don’t tell – that’s your principle, yes? As employed by myself when addressing graduate students, politicians, and other forms of lower life. Oh, maybe I shouldn’t make jokes like that before a godlike alien engine. But – hell, you’re still wrong. An infinitely old universe? That’s simply impossible.’
No reply.
‘Huh. You want us to figure it out ourselves, do you?’
That is up to you. You say an infinitely old universe is impossible. I say it is not merely possible, but perfect.
Vasta frowned. ‘OK, that’s stumped me. Perfect?’
Meriel said cautiously, ‘Take it easy. Thinking too hard just knocked you out, Elizabeth. So what was it you said just before you fainted?’
‘What? I don’t remember.’
‘About some paradox—’
‘Olbers’ paradox?’ Salma prompted.
‘Yes! Right! Well done, Salma. Even when half-unconscious I was groping for the right argument. An old argument. From the eighteenth, nineteenth century? Olbers was an amateur astronomer – I think he was a physician by trade.’
Meriel grinned. ‘All the deepest thinkers are physicians.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Olbers criticised the then-popular theories that the universe must be infinite, on the basis that the sky doesn’t look like it’s infinitely deep. Think about it. Suppose space was full, to infinity, of a cloud of stars. The further away from you they are, the dimmer they will be. But every which way you look, your eye would have to hit a ray of starlight. And so the night sky would have to be as bright as the Sun, uniformly.’
‘But we don’t see that,’ Salma said, cautiously.
‘Right. We don’t see it. So something’s wrong with the assumptions. It makes no difference that the stars are gathered into galaxies; the galaxies would carpet the sky just as much. Dust clouds in the way? No, the starlight flood would just batter them with heat until they shone just as brightly as the stars.’ She lifted her head, looked around, as if seeking Terminus. ‘That’s how we know our universe is finite, with a finite age. And the same applies here. So this universe can’t be infinite, or infinitely old. Because the sky is dark. Are you listening to this?’
Of course. But your logic is faulty. This universe is infinitely old, and infinite in extent – but it is expanding.
Salma could see the puzzlement on Doria’s face. And then what looked like a slow, reluctant realisation.
‘Right,’ Doria said. ‘Of course. If the universe is expanding, any radiation, passing from far enough out, is going to be Doppler-shifted to invisibility, undetectability. Its wavelength would be stretched out until it became, eventually, nothing but a trace of heat. I can even see how the maths would work out.’
Meriel seemed to be thinking it through more slowly. Grudgingly she said, ‘I think that’s right—’
Salma broke in, ‘I don’t get it. Expanding into what? If the universe is infinite already, where else can it expand into?’
Vasta rubbed her arm. ‘That’s the trick with infinity. Remember the book with the never-ending pages? Infinity doesn’t end, no matter how much stuff you push that way. Think of it as an unfillable garbage chute. Much like this conversation. Oh, hell, help me up, will you? I think I’m over my conceptual shock by now.’
Meriel helped Vasta up, but glared at her. ‘I’ll let you go. But I’ll be slaving your suit systems to my suit from now on – just so you know.’
‘Yes, Doc.’
Salma barely heard all this. She thought they were all missing the point about this supposedly infinite universe. As Meriel fiddled some more with Vasta’s suit, Salma asked, ‘So what about the life?’
They stared at her.
‘The life in the sky …’
Then Meriel said, ‘She’s got a point. The green stars, remember? Not a lot of them, but—’
‘Our instrument package agrees with her,’ Vasta said. Now, ignoring Meriel’s ministrations, she was scanning a readout display on her sleeve, near the pressure suit’s cuff. ‘We all saw the green starlight, right? My analysis here shows carbon compounds … I’m asking it a specific question. Yep, some of the chemistry up there is probably capable of a kind of photosynthesis, even if the chemistry’s not the same as ours.
‘Green stuff is up there, capturing a star’s energy to make – well, more green stuff. Clouds of algae, maybe.’ She looked vaguely at the opaque roof of the shelter. ‘We’ll need to do a lot more work before we can establish if all the green we see is natural – some kind of panspermia, life drifting from star to star – or if it’s being given assistance from some kind of intelligence.’
Doria said, ‘You’re thinking Dyson clouds, or shells. Glass-walled habitats around a star, huge greenhouses grabbing the light, the green light leaking out through spaceborne forests …’
‘Hmph. Just as you lunar folk dream of cloaking the Sun some day, don’t you?’
Doria raised an eyebrow. ‘Not really the time or place for a politically provocative discussion, Professor Vasta.’
Salma found she liked the idea. ‘Stars turned green by growing things. Green from life. Life everywhere, then. In this universe.’ And she hugged Feathers, who seemed baffled, but hugged her back.
‘Yes,’ Vasta said, pressing ahead, but evidently unsure of her ground. ‘But it doesn’t matter whether it’s panspermia or some kind of conscious propagation. In our universe we see no evidence of life save on Earth, or life that’s spread from Earth – into the ice moons, for instance. We think Earth life was perhaps a fluke: that some prebiotic evolutionary process happened to hit on just the right organic chemistry to support life, in a relatively short time, in a relatively small, young universe. Mere billions of years.’
Doria laughed. ‘Mere.’
‘So just as our friend Terminus said, we are the product of a fluke. Alone.
‘Whereas here,’ Vasta pressed on stubbornly, ‘here the universe is so big and so old that life has had time to spread all over the place. Maybe even to evolve independently several times. So we see green in the sky.
‘And so, I suppose, it’s quite possible for a being like Feathers to evolve, from an independent biosphere, and with similarities to the humanoid. Even though the unlikeliness is multiplied. There has been room, and time – probably a lot of time – for such unlikely occurrences to happen. If you want a lookalike, all you have to do is go search this place.’
Your argument is less wrong than before.
Elizabeth laughed hollowly. ‘Thanks. Next time I need a job reference, I’ll call you.’ She looked around, as if trying to see Terminus beyond the walls once more. ‘You’re leading us to a conclusion, aren’t you? This universe isn’t just big and old. It’s infinite. It’s eternal.
‘In fact—’ She took a breath. ‘This is almost heretical. This is what they used to call continuous creation. Am I right?’
A silence.
Then: I believe I understand what you say. You must say it for yourself, however.
Here, things are arranged differently.
Are you ready to come out and see?
39
The sky outside was utterly different now – though still brilliantly bright, Salma thought. Crowded with stars, some of them greened. But her suit visor turned nearly completely opaque, so that she saw only a dull-brownish version of the vivid reality.
The vivid reality: a galaxy, apparently a huge one, its edges ragged – and each dangling thread of that raggedness was a chain of stars, she knew – with a dazzling pinpoint of light at the Galaxy’s very core.
And out of the heart of the monster fired two spears, both along the spin axis, above and below the disc – lines of light that looked to emulate in length the radius of that big galaxy, so spanning hundreds of thousands of light-years, and still coherent across that length. It could be a quasar, Salma knew now, maybe like the one emerging from the home galaxy in another reality.
Meriel, it seemed, more mundanely, had been checking the sensors mounted on her own suit. ‘The environment isn’t what we saw before the transition. All of you run a system check on your suits and visors. And keep on doing it until we’re out of this intensity of light. The radiation levels are high too …’ She thought. ‘Very high. Ten minutes, then we’re back out of here, into the shelter, come what may.’
And Vasta called, ‘Terminus!’
I am here.
‘Are we elsewhere in your eternal universe? What is this place?’
You will call it a creation node.
‘We will, will we? Why?’
Because I just told you you would.
‘These damn causal loops … OK. So what is this – an active galaxy?’
This would be one of the largest galaxies in your own cosmos. Were it in your cosmos. The key element is the central black hole.
‘I thought it might be,’ Vasta said. ‘A quasar?’
Essentially. But an enormous one, and enormously powerful. Its mass is equivalent to the mass-energy of ten thousand trillion suns. Its mass usage and energy output—
‘I get the idea. And what is it doing?’
Creating matter and energy from nothing.
Or rather, extracting it from the higher-dimensional substrate which underlies all our realities – as your theorists know. Your home universe exploded out of that substrate, in an instant. Here it is as if that substrate is slowly leaking material into this universe.
‘Continuous creation,’ Vasta breathed. She glanced around at the others. ‘I know what this is. That’s what it used to be called, as a theory. Continuous creation. It’s a beautiful, but wrong – or so we thought – model of how the universe might work.’
Doria said, ‘Imagine we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’
‘OK. So the … place … he took us to before was another universe, but it was evidently like our own. With a Big Bang origin, and ages of expansion, and then a heat death termination. He showed us its birth and death … But this is another universe yet again – and fundamentally different.
‘Suppose, instead of a Big Bang, where all the stuff of the universe is created in a single flash, you start slowly, but just keep on creating stuff slowly. Just a dribble would be enough – just like here, if it lasted for ever. And as the universe expands that … new stuff … fills in the gaps.’
Salma tried to understand. ‘Like a balloon. You could paint it, and blow it up further, and then the paint would crack and you’d have to fill in the gaps. But you’d need more paint to do that.’
Vasta said, ‘That’s the idea. Not a bad analogy. Except that you would never run out of paint.
‘That seems paradoxical to us. But so, I suppose, should the idea of everything just bursting into existence all at once, in a Big Bang, and we accept that.’ She tapped at her wrist console, peered at scrolling text. ‘According to some of these old studies, you wouldn’t need much new stuff to keep the expansion of our universe going. One model suggested you’d only need one new hydrogen atom – or the equivalent in energy, or some other form – one atom per kilometre-wide box of space, per year. Umm. That’s, uh, one new star per year, or stellar mass, in a cube of side a million light-years – a box that could contain a galaxy cluster, like our own local cluster with the Milky Way and Andromeda. Which might contain two trillion stars.’ She looked up and grinned. ‘A formation just like the one we see up there. One extra star every year, or the material to make it … When you put it like that, it sounds almost plausible, doesn’t it?’
She dug further into her information.
‘I see that back on Earth the theory was popular for a while, and gave the Big Bang a run for its money – I mean, it tested that theory to its limits. But it was shot down in the end by observations – by the fact that the past of our universe, which we could see directly, thanks to the finiteness of the speed of light, was different from the present. On a large scale, I mean. And the future seemed likely to be different again, when all the stars go out … In a continuous creation universe, nothing would change, at least on the largest of scales …’ She peered up at the ‘quasar’. ‘And this is a creation node. So, what material is being produced? New protons?’
Not directly, Terminus said. The portal ejects what you might think of as super-protons, immensely heavy compared to the components of normal matter. Each masses a few hundred thousandths of a gram – or as much as a billion billion protons – and, once created, these particles each decay in the Planck time—
