Stephen Baxter: Exultant

Kimmer looked thunderous. “You had better explain yourself, Commissary.”

Nilis waved his data desk. “I told you. I have it!”

“You have what?”

“The truth about Chandra. The Xeelee live off the black hole. But the Xeelee aren’t alone…”

The monads cared nothing for humans, of course, or for quagmites, or Xeelee, or photino birds, or any of the rest of the universe’s menagerie at this or any other age. But they liked their universes to have story; and it was living things that generated the most interesting sagas.

And so in the time before time, when they picked out their seedling universes from the reef of possibilities, the monads, midwives of reality, exerted a subtle selection pressure. They chose for enrichment only the brightest bubbles in the cosmic spindrift: bubbles with a special, precious quality. A tendency to complexify.

Thoughtful beings, human and otherwise, would wonder at the endless fecundity of their universe, a universe that spawned life at every stage of its existence — and wonder why it had to be so.

Some of them came to understand that it was the universe’s own innate tendency to complexify that had created the richness of structure within it.

Simple laws of molecular combination governed the growth of such intricate, inanimate forms as snowflakes and DNA molecules. But autocatalysis and homeostasis enabled simple structures to interact and spin off more complex structures still, until living things emerged, which combined into ever more complicated entities.

The same pattern showed in other aspects of reality. The hive structures of ant colonies and Coalescent communities emerged without conscious design from the small decisions of their drones. Even in the world of human ideas, the structures of religions, economies, and empires fed back on themselves and became ever richer. Even mathematical toys, like games of artificial life run in computer memories, seemed to demonstrate an unwavering tendency to grow more complicated. But then, human mathematics was a mirror of the universe humans found themselves in; that was why mathematics worked.

Complexifying seemed inevitable. But it was not. A universe could be imagined without this tendency.

If the ability to complexify had suddenly been turned off, the universe would have seemed very different. Snowflakes would not form, birds would not flock, ants and Coalescents would have tumbled out of their disintegrating hives, baffled. On larger scales, economic and historical cycles would break up. Ecosystems would fail; there would be no coral reefs, no forests. The great cycles of matter and energy, mediated by life, on a living world like Earth would collapse.

But of course there would be no observers of such catastrophes, for without complexity’s search for feedback loops and stable processes, hearts could not beat, and embryos could not form.

Humans had the good fortune to exist in a universe in which there was no law of conservation of complexity, no limit to its supply.

But it didn’t have to be that way. That the universe could complexify, that richness of existence was possible at all, was thanks to the monads, and their subtle pan-cosmic selection. The monads had selected, designed, nurtured a universe that would be fruitful forever, in which there was no limit to the possibilities for life and energy, for life and mind, as far ahead as it was possible to look.

While empires rose and fell, while the universe continued its endless unraveling of possibility after possibility, the monads slumbered. They had done their work, made their contribution. Now they waited for the precious moments of the furthest future when this universe, in turn grown old, spawned new fragments of chaos, and they could wake again.

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

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…”

Luru Parz said slowly, “The Commissary fears that if we destroy the monads we will break the thread — don’t you, Nilis? — the shining thread of life, of creativity, that connects this universe to those that preceded it, and to those that will follow. To kill them would be patricide — or deicide, perhaps.” She smiled. “Ah, but I forgot. In this enlightened age you don’t have gods — or fathers, do you? It’s entirely appropriate of humanity that when we do find God, we try to turn Him into a weapon, and then kill Him.”

“Shut up, you old monster,” Kimmer said.

Luru Parz said coldly, “But this is why I’ve been trying to stop you, Nilis. To stop this pointless research.”

His jaw dropped. “You — it was you? You obstructed me, you blocked me from the data, the processing resources I needed? I thought you were my ally, Luru Parz. It was you who said we must study the black hole in the first place!”

“Study it sufficiently to destroy it — that’s all we needed. Not this! Knowledge is a weapon, Nilis. That’s all it is. I always feared that if you rooted around for long enough you’d find some reason not to complete the project. Academic fools like you always do.”