Stephen Baxter - Vacuum Diagrams

The lead turned out to be accurate. The Ghosts’ dangerous project was unfolding in the heart of a red giant star — concealing their work from the Xeelee, and, incidentally, from us.

The disastrous outcome of that project all but destroyed us.

After that, human surveillance of Ghost quagma projects was stepped up.

And now it seemed that the Ghosts were at it again.

The Sink Ambassador said, “You do not understand, Jack Raoul.”

“Oh, don’t I?”

“This is a new program, of great significance. We have every right to progress it, unhindered. Now.” It suddenly turned hospitable. “You have traveled a long way. Your doctor is on hand. Perhaps you wish to rest, before returning to the plane of the Galaxy—”

I approached it, holding my arms out wide, my silvered hands raised like weapons. I hoped that the Ghosts — the Sink Ambassador at any rate — had studied humans sufficiently to get something out of my body language. “Sink Ambassador, we’re not going to let this go. We have to know what you’re doing, out here.” I pushed my sculptured face so close to its silvery hide I could see my own distorted reflection. “After last time, we’re quite prepared to use force.”

It seemed to stiffen; I tried to read the thin tones of the translator chips. “Is this some formal declaration of—”

“Not at all,” I said. “Our communications are secure, right now. This is just you, and me, out here in the halo of the Galaxy. I simply want you to understand the whole picture, Sink Ambassador.”

It hovered in space for a long time, complex standing waves shimmering across its surface. Then: “Very well. Jack Raoul — what do you know of dark matter?”

Dark matter: a shadow Universe which permeates, barely touching, the visible worlds we inhabit… And yet that image was misleading, for the dark matter is no shadow; it comprises fully nine-tenths of the Universe’s total mass. The glowing, baryonic matter which makes up stars, planets, humans, is a mere glittering froth on the surface of that dark ocean.

I let the Ambassador download data into me. In my enhanced vision, huge Virtual schematics overlaid the Galaxy’s majestic disc.

“Dark matter cannot form stars,” the Sink Ambassador said. “As a result, much larger clouds — larger than galaxies — are the equilibrium form for dark matter. The Universe is populated by immense, cold, bland clouds of dark matter: it is a spectral cosmos, almost without structure.”

“This is no doubt fascinating, Sink Ambassador, but I don’t see—”

“Jack Raoul, we believe we have found a way to construct soliton stars: stellar-mass objects, of dark matter. Such is the purpose of the experiment, conducted here. We will build the first dark matter stars, the first in the Universe’s history.”

I pondered that. It was a typically grandiose Ghost scheme.

But — what was its true goal?

And why all the secrecy, from the Xeelee and from us? I knew there must be layers of truth, hidden beneath the surface of what the Ambassador had told me, just as their nuggets of quagma had been inexpertly hidden beneath the regolith of their hollowed-out moon.

“…Maybe I can answer your questions, Jack.”

From the glands stored within my silver hide, adrenaline pumped into my system. I turned.

“Eve.”

My dead wife smiled at me.

The Sink Ambassador receded, turning to a tiny point of light. The Galaxy shimmered like a Ghost’s hide, dimming.

Then all the stars went out.

I looked down at myself. I was human again.

Once we’d owned an apartment at the heart of the New Bronx. It was a nice place, light and roomy, with state-of-the-art Virtual walls. Since my metamorphosis, I can’t use it anymore, but I keep it anyhow, leaving it unoccupied. Unchanged, in fact, since Eve’s death. I just like to know it’s there.

Now I was back in that apartment. I was alone.

I went to the drinks cabinet, poured myself a malt, and waited. I can still drink, of course, but I’ve discovered that much of the pleasure of liquor comes from the tactile sensations of the bottle clinking against the glass, the heavy mass of the liquor in the base of the glass, the first rush of flavor.

Being injected just isn’t the same.

I savoured my malt. It was terrific. There was more processing power behind this simulation, whatever it was, than any I’d encountered before —

One wall melted. Eve was sitting on a couch like mine. She smiled at me again.

“You have a lot of questions,” she said.

I sipped my drink. “Will you join me?”

She shook her head. She looked older than when she’d died. She pulled at a lock of hair, a habit she’d had since she was a child.

I said, “This is a Virtual simulation, right?”

“In a sense.”

“You’re not Eve. If you were, you wouldn’t even be here.” Even the Virtual copy of Eve would have cared too much to do this to me, to plunge me back into this self-regarding mess.

Despite my loneliness after the metamorphosis, I hadn’t called up Eve in seven, eight years.

“Jack, I’m a better image than any you’ve seen before. Richer. Indistinguishable from—”

“No. I can distinguish.”

She said, “You must understand what the Ghosts are doing here. And why you must allow them to proceed.”

“Oh, must I? And you’re here to persuade me, right?”

She stepped up to the surface of the Virtual wall which separated us. After a moment, I put down my drink and approached her.

She stepped out of the wall.

I could feel her warmth, the feather of her breath on my face. My heart was pounding, somewhere, in a hollow metal chest cavity.

…But even as I stared at Eve, I was figuring how much processing power this Virtual must be demanding. This creature with me wasn’t Eve, and it sure wasn’t the cosy untouchable Virtual representation my apartment used to call up. How were the Ghosts doing this?

She held out her hand. I reached out, and my fingers passed through her arm; her flesh, crumbling into cuboid pixels, had the texture of dead leaves.

“I’m sorry.” She pushed back her hair. She reached out to me again.

This time, when her fingers settled in mine, they were warm and soft; her hand was like a bird, living and responsive.

“Oh, Eve.” I couldn’t help myself.

“Jack, you must understand.”

Behind her, the wall turned black.

Eve’s hand was still warm in mine. “You must watch,” she told me, “and learn. It is a long story…”

There was a patch of light, diffuse, in the center of the wall. It resolved into the blue Earth. Ships swam around it, on sparks of light.

It was, I saw, the morning of mankind, two thousand years before my own birth.

“It’s difficult now to recapture the mood of those times,” Eve said. “Confidence — arrogance…”

Earth was restored. Great macroengineering projects, supplemented by the nanoengineering of the atmosphere and lithosphere and the transfer off-planet of most power-generating and industrial concerns, had stabilized and preserved the planet’s fragile ecosystem. There was more woodland covering the temperate regions than at any time since the last glaciation, locking in much of the excess carbon dioxide which had plagued previous centuries. And the great decline in species suffered after the industrialization of previous millennia was reversed, thanks to the use of genetic archives and careful reconstruction — from disparate descendants — of lost genotypes.