Stephen Baxter - Ring

Now the pod’s rotation carried the new sun out of visibility, below the pod’s limited horizon. And — slowly, majestically — the lights of their new galaxy rose over their heads.

This galaxy was a flat elliptical, but would have seemed a dwarf compared to the great galaxies on the other side of the Ring: with a mass of a billion suns, the star system was a mere hundredth the bulk of the Milky Way, or Andromeda, and not much larger than the old Magellanic Clouds, the minor companion galaxies to the Milky Way. And — since the average size of stars here was a hundred times greater than in the Milky Way — there were only ten million stars in this galaxy, compared to the Milky Way’s hundred billion… But every one of those stars was a brilliant white VMO, making this galaxy into a tapestry of piercingly bright points of light. It was like, Louise thought, surveying a field of ten million gems fixed to a bed of velvet.

This universe was crowded with these bland, toy galaxies; they filled space in a random but uniform array, as far as could be seen in all directions. This cosmos was young — too young for the immense, slow, processes of time to have formed the great structures of galactic clusters, superclusters, walls and voids which would one day dominate space.

Morrow stared up uneasily at the soaring form of the galaxy. Apparently unconsciously, he wrapped both hands across his stomach.

“Morrow, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he told Louise, unconvincingly. “I guess I’m just a little susceptible to centrifugal force.”

Louise patted his hands. “It’s probably Coriolis, actually — the sideways force. But you shouldn’t let the pod’s rotation bother you,” she said. She thought it over. “In fact, you should welcome your motion sickness.”

Morrow raised his shaven eyebrow ridges. “Really?”

“It’s a sensation that tells you you’re here, Morrow. Embedded in this new universe…”

The laws of physics were expressions of basic symmetries, Louise told him. And symmetries between frames of reference were among the most powerful symmetries there were.

Morrow looked dubious. “What has this to do with space sickness?”

“Well, look: here’s a particular type of symmetry. The pod’s rotating, in the middle of a stationary universe. So you feel centrifugal and Coriolis forces twisting forces. The forces are what is making you uncomfortable. But what about symmetry? Try a thought experiment. Imagine that the pod was stationary, in the middle of a rotating universe.” She raised her hands to the galaxy wheeling above them. “How would you tell the difference? The stars would look the same, moving around the pod.”

“And we’d feel the same spin forces?”

“Yes, we would. You’d feel just as queasy, Morrow.”

“But where would the forces come from?”

She smiled. “That’s the point. They would come from the inertial drag of the rotating universe: a drag exerted by the huge river of stars and galaxies, flowing around you.

“So you shouldn’t be worried by, or embarrassed by, your queasiness. That’s the feeling of your new universe, plucking at you with fingers of inertial drag.”

He smiled weakly, and ran a palm over his bare, sweat sprinkled scalp. “Well, thanks for the thought,” he said. “But somehow it doesn’t make me feel a lot better.”

Spinner-of-Rope and Mark were sitting in the two seats behind Louise and Morrow. Now Mark leaned forward. “Well, it should,” he said. “The fact that general relativity is working here — as, in fact, are all our familiar laws as far as we can tell, to the limits of observation — is the reason we’re still alive, probably.”

Spinner-of-Rope snorted; VMO light gleamed from the arrow head pendant she still wore between her breasts. “Maybe so. But if this universe is so damn similar, I don’t see why it should be so different. If you see what I mean.”

Mark spread his hands, and tilted his head back to look at the dwarf galaxy. “The only real difference, Spinner, is one of point of view. It’s all a question of when.”

Spinner frowned. “What do you mean, ‘when’?” Behind her spectacles Spinner’s small, round face seemed set, intent on the conversation, but Louise noticed how her hands tugged at each other endlessly, like small animals wriggling in her lap. Spinner-of-Rope had been left too long in that nightfighter pilot cage, Louise thought. Spinner had seen too much, too fast…

Since she’d been retrieved from the cage Spinner had seemed healthy enough, and Mark assured Louise that she’d retained her basic sanity. Even her illusion of communicating with Michael Poole — an illusion she’d dropped as they came through the Ring — seemed to have had some, unfathomable, basis in reality, Mark said.

Fine. But, Louise sensed, Spinner-of-Rope still wasn’t fully recovered from her ordeal. She still wasn’t whole. It would take time — decades, perhaps — for the post-traumatic stress to work its way out of her system. Well, Spinner-of-Rope would have the time she needed, Louise was determined.

Mark said, “Spinner, this universe is just like ours except that it’s around twenty billion years younger.

“This is a baby cosmos. It emerged from its own Big Bang less than a billion years ago. And it’s smaller — space-rime hasn’t had the time to unravel as far as in our old Universe, so this cosmos is something of the order of a hundredth the size. And the stars — ”

“Yes?”

“Spinner, these are the first stars ever to shine here. Not one of the stars we see out there is more than a million years old.”

Out of the primordial nucleosynthesis of the singularity, here, had emerged clouds of hydrogen and helium, with little contamination by heavier elements. The new sky had been dark, illuminated only by the dying echo of the radiation which had emerged from the singularity. Then the gas clouds gathered into proto galactic clumps, each with the mass of a billion Sols. Thermal instabilities had caused the proto galaxies to collapse further, into knots with mass a hundred Suns or more.

Soon, the first of these smooth-burning stars had guttered to life: brilliant monsters, some with the mass of a million Suns.

Slowly, the sky had filled with light.

“The way these stars were born is unique,” Mark said, “because they are the first. There were no previous stars. So the proto-galaxies were a lot smoother — the gas clouds weren’t all churned up by the heat and gravity of earlier generations of stars. And the gas was free of heavy elements. Heavy elements act to keep young stars cooler, and to limit the size of the stars that form. That’s why these babies are so immense.

“These are what we call Population III stars, Spinner. Or VMOs — ‘Very Massive Objects’.”

“If they are so massive,” Spinner said slowly, “then I guess they won’t last so long as stars like Sol.”

Louise looked at her appreciatively. “That’s perceptive, Spinner. You’re right. The VMOs burn their hydrogen fuel quickly. Each of these is going to stay on its Main Sequence for no more than a few million years — two or three, at best. The Sun, on the other hand, should have survived for tens of billions of years, without the interference of the photino birds.”

“What then?” Spinner asked. “What do we do when New Sol goes out?”

Morrow smiled. “Then, I guess, we move on: to another star, and another, and another… We have time here to work that out, I think, Spinner-of-Rope.”

Now New Sol was rising again, over the lip of the pod. The four of them turned instinctively to the light, its flat whiteness smoothing the lines of age and fatigue in their faces.