COSM

by Gregory Benford

  Jill shivered. She had suggested building a fire, but they had no wood, and anyway that would be a giveaway. “So the stars are mortal, same as us.”

  Zak said, “They just take longer.”

  “I wonder if there’s life in there,” Jill said.

  Max said, “That galaxy we’re watching ebb away is ten times older than ours. In an hour it’ll be a few billion more.”

  Alicia thought of life, sheltering closer and closer to star warmth. They would have to labor hard to capture light.

  From Zak’s radio came a long stream of invective against Alicia. She jumped up suddenly and swore back at it.

  Max chuckled, not taking his eyes from the Cosm. “Fools taking your name in vain? Now you know how God must feel.”

  She glared at him. “All this goddess stuff—so okay, I created this first universe, but plenty of people can now.”

  He regarded her soberly, the planes of his face sharp in the luminosity of the Cosm. “What makes you think you were the first?”

  8

  Jill swayed in the night, hoisting the bottle she had produced from her backpack.

  “One tequila,

  two tequila,

  three tequila,

  —floor.”

  A dramatic pratfall. Appreciative applause. They were getting cold but could not stop watching the unfolding drama written by radiance across the sphere’s face. Jill’s tequila came at just the right moment. It was like attending a wake, Alicia thought as she took a swig of the raw stuff straight from the bottle. A wake for a universe: hers. With one of her children, an elliptical galaxy, smoldering in the foreground.

  She went to the Pathfinder and hauled out warmer clothing from her suitcase. She had been meticulously planning things when she packed it, thinking of nights spent in motels with Max. Right on top was a killer purple chemise, a reliable if predictable black lace teddy, plus her latest weapon in the passion arms race, a magenta front-hook demi-bra… all nestled beneath the baggy gray panties that she usually wore.

  Her optimism seemed remote, odd, like a packet of your teenage love letters found in a drawer when you’re clearing out after your second divorce.

  Why? She had run faster and harder than she had ever imagined. Her implacable, unseen pursuers she had felt like a dark weight always at her back. Fatigue gnawed at her still.

  But she had indeed gotten away. They were safe for at least this final night, here in the serene dry wastes. Why this drifting sense of melancholy?

  The Cosm. She could not resist its ebbing drama. Brad had died to bring it to this point, death surrounding Creation, her Creation, that now itself must wane and perish. In a desert.

  “Say, there are those jets again.” Zak’s voice came through the chilling night. She threw on a heavy jacket and hurried back.

  The Cosm point of view was on an arc high above the somber masses of the elliptical galaxy. This gave it a penetrating view of the central core. Crimson crescents rimmed the smoldering inner regions, now swept clean of dust. At the dead center was true deadness: an immense black hole, growing by devouring the exhausted suns that orbited ever closer to its engulfing grip.

  But above the inner black hung a lance of shimmering yellow. As she watched with the others, it grew, poking out into the empty void above the shrinking elliptical.

  “Funny,” Max said, “the theory says jets are a symptom of a black hole’s early life, when there’s plenty of dust around to get sucked in.”

  “So the theory’s wrong,” Jill said lightly.

  She had been at the tequila. Alicia thought about having some more, but something told her she wasn’t going to go that route again.

  Max nodded ruefully. “Not exactly a big surprise.”

  “Pretty,” Zak said. “And look, there’s another on the other side of the galaxy, going the opposite way. They’re forcing their way out, already bigger than the elliptical itself.”

  Max spoke slowly as they watched the jets work their way away from the growing blackness. Stars would inevitably meet and merge, he said. All the wisdom and order of planets and suns finally compressed into the marriage of many stars, plunging down the pit of gravity to become black holes. The fate of nearly all matter would be the dark pyre of collapse.

  Galaxies are as mortal as stars. The elliptical was being devoured. Inky masses of smaller black holes blotted out whole zones of dim maroon. The central hole chewed visibly faster, a squatting appetite gnawing without end.

  She tried to imagine the events he described; obviously Max had been brooding over this for some time, seeing what was coming.

  Against an utterly black sky, shadowy cinders of stars glided. Planets might still orbit them, their atmospheres frozen out into waveless lakes of oxygen.

  But the Cosm universe was no static lattice of stars. It grew and galaxies found themselves lonely in the gathering dark. The fabric of space stretched as time ticked on.

  As they watched and the pace accelerated, the Cosm’s viewpoint plunged back into the maelstrom of dying masses. Its orbit now arced through a long, toiling twilight. Grand operas of mass and energy played out their plots, their last arias sung. Nowhere in the chilly desolations could Alicia see any refuge for life, for any rickety assembly of water in tiny compartment cells, dangling on a lattice of moving calcium rods. Any life in there, she thought, would have to transform itself profoundly, remaking its basic structures from organic molecules to, say, animated crystalline sheets.

  Witnessing such grandeur, she felt like an imposter, a derelict who had accidentally stumbled into a grand opera, a dog wearing clothes.

  Something in the murky masses caught her eye. A glimmering line stretched away from the galactic hub. Its pale yellow lanced through shadowy swarms of spent stars. In the distance another long curve worked, structures growing with great speed, long and spindly and…

  “Those… they’re forming something,” she whispered.

  Max said, “Look, they’re linking up.”

  “Circles around the whole galactic center,” Zak said.

  Jill said, “And spokes shooting outward, too, see?”

  “Almost like a coordinate system, longitude and latitude…” Alicia’s voice trailed off. Her breath was fog in the encroaching cold.

  “Maybe magnetic?” Max said.

  “Anybody’s guess,” Zak said.

  Max pointed. “And growing so fast—look there.”

  From the concentric circles and the spokes came a brimming luminosity. Colors flickered where they intersected. Then the entire network—there was no other term for it, she thought hastily—began to throb with quick lightning strokes of brilliant gold and crimson. To Alicia the display crackled with energy, with…

  “Purpose.” Her word hung in the air.

  “What’s that?” Max got up and crouched closer to the sphere.

  “Looks like thinner lines, poking up from the grid,” Zak said.

  “Like a root system spreading or something,” Jill said. “What’s going on, supernovas or something?”

  “The supernovas are extinct,” Max said. “All the stellar energy is burnt-out.”

  “Well, something’s lighting up this thing,” Jill said reasonably.

  The Cosm’s point of view veered then, swooping once more back toward the central hub of the dying galaxy. Against great ebony banks of dead suns, a few embers glowed. Yet the growing luminosity of the circles and grids cast a glow even into these somber, clotted clouds.

  “Those ‘roots’ of yours, maybe that’s not a bad term,” Max said. “Something’s growing. From what I don’t know. But growing.”

  “Making structure in the face of oblivion,” Alicia said with sudden energy.

  “Looks like something alive to me,” Jill said.

  Max stayed rooted in his crouch for a long moment and then said softly, “I can’t imagine anything else. Life! But where does it get the energy?”

  “Not even the best theorists know everything,” Alicia said ligh
tly.

  They sat and watched as fibers grew from the lattice that now spanned the entire giant elliptical galaxy. Against the cinder-dark bulk of dead and dying suns the pattern beamed its silent, persistent message.

  Alicia could not take her eyes from the spreading luminescence. A part of her dearly wanted to believe that perhaps this was the final answer to the significance of it all. In principle, life and structure, hopes and dreams could persist—if it chose to and struggled. In the far future of her own universe, in a darkness beyond measure, something could dream fresh dreams.

  In the Cosm’s realm, did unimaginable entities now recall a distant, legendary era when matter brewed energy by crushing suns together, when boundless energy let life dwell in mere accidental assemblies of atoms, and paltry planets formed a stage?

  9

  “What’s that?” Zak said suddenly.

  They had been sitting silently for a while now. They watched the impossible fretwork grow in the darkening carcass of a seemingly deceased galaxy. Alicia dragged her attention from the vision.

  She listened. “A car?”

  “More like a plane.”

  “Damn! They’ll see us in the infrared.” Max jumped to his feet.

  “Those people back at the restaurant. I sure didn’t fool them for long.” Alicia got up, her joints aching.

  “Get inside,” Zak said quickly. “We’re the warmest things here and the vehicles have cooled off.”

  Alicia and Max tumbled into the Pathfinder, Zak and Jill into the van. She hated to leave the Cosm.

  The buzzing came closer. The Pathfinder cab was warmer and Alicia lazed back, unable to resist her weary body’s demands.

  Max rolled down the window an inch. “Sounds like a plane.”

  “What did you mean back there, about my not being the first… goddess?”

  “You’re the only goddess for me, kid,” he said in a quite passable Bogart imitation.

  “No, seriously. As our comeuppance bears down upon us.”

  “I’ve been thinking about the larger picture here.”

  She chuckled. “What we just saw wasn’t big enough?”

  “Granted. I mean conceptually. Look, do you think the production of Cosms will stop here?”

  She thought about Brookhaven, about the sociology of particle physics, of the personalities, of the entire horizon-pushing history of the cultures that had come out of Europe over five hundred years before. “No.”

  “And the Brookhaven Cosm, it’s not quite like ours. It differs slightly in some fundamental parameter, apparently, though we don’t know which one yet.”

  “So?” Lazy warmth, the buzzing slowly getting louder, then fainter, then louder again: a search pattern.

  “Any future Cosms we meddlers make can also differ slightly in fundamental numbers. Some will be changes that make life impossible, some will be good for life. Maybe even better than this universe, though certainly ours looks very finely tuned to make life possible.”

  “Even enjoyable.” She reached out in the dark and found his hand.

  “Look at it this way. You’ve given this universe the ability to make copies of itself. But not perfect copies. We’ve just seen that life did incredibly well in your Cosm—it outlasted the death of stars!”

  “Yeah, let’s see goddamn Brookhaven do better than that.” Had she had too much tequila? Well, write it off to fatigue.

  “They may, they may not. Point is, pretty soon we’ll have three elements. First, a population of self-reproducing universes. Second, small variations in the basic ‘message’ those daughter universes have.”

  “Daughters of the goddess,” she said dreamily. Not that she ruled out having some flesh and blood ones someday, too. A little early to bring that up, though.

  “Third element. Suppose your Cosm built its own RHIC. Then they made universes, too. Some will work out and support life. Others got the parameters too far from optimum and didn’t make stars, maybe, or carbon that was stable. No life in those, then.”

  She caught a glimmer of what was coming in his argument and then she caught another glimmer, a real light this time, sweeping over the ridgeline beyond.

  The airplane circled them twice, sweeping the area with searchlights. Then it headed south and was gone.

  “They spotted us for sure,” Zak called from the van. “What’ll we do?”

  Alicia rolled down her window. “Nothing.”

  “But they’ll catch us.”

  “They were always going to catch us. The only question was when.” She started rolling up the window.

  “Shouldn’t we give them a run for their money?” Jill said.

  “We did. Now we’d just be playing their game.” She rolled up the window and looked at Max.

  “You’re right,” he said.

  “Tell me the rest of it.”

  “With even ordinary curiosity, intelligence in your Cosm is going to try out its own Cosm-making experiments, if only to check the theory. Maybe they even find a way to enter a daughter universe, to migrate there, who knows? Anyway, some of their daughters are hospitable to life, so those in turn evolve intelligence, and their daughter universes do the same…”

  “Conceivably.” On a night like this, damn near anything was conceivable.

  “All the created universes that can’t spawn intelligent life never reproduce. They’re sterile. So in time—not our time, or even Cosm time, but a kind of meta-time that measures all this—you get more and more Cosms with life in them. Even if the odds of making a Cosm that’s hospitable to life are small, eventually they prevail because they outbreed the sterile ones.”

  “There’s a natural selection for universes with intelligence in them.” She tried on the idea, breathing shallowly.

  “Exactly. Only you weren’t the first, of course.”

  “What?”

  “A natural selection process explains why our universe’s constants fit life so well. We’re a daughter universe ourselves.”

  “No way.”

  “Think in the frame of meta-time, Alicia. There are plenty of Cosms with life in them, after a while. What are the odds that any single one, picked at random, was the original?”

  She frowned. “I’m leery of statistical arguments.”

  He grinned, a pale profile. “Look, there are different kinds of scientific interest: the known, the unknown, and the flat-out unknowable. This idea falls in the unknowable. It’s plausible, but how can we check it? Probably we can’t. But we can still ask questions, invent explanations about what started it all.”

  “Then some experimenter in a lab…”

  “Made us. Yes.” He said it very mildly.

  “Just like me.”

  “Except that experimenter had tentacles, yes.”

  “And all this… this wonder and glory, by accident?”

  “That’s what Darwin said about species. I’m just applying the same logic to universes.”

  “But that leaves out any cause to our whole universe.”

  “Unless accidents are God’s way of dodging responsibility.”

  “And this isn’t an infinite chain, right?” She bit her lip, seeing implications running in all directions. “All you’ve done is shift the beginning back some distance in, uh, meta-time.”

  “Right. I take no position on what god or goddess started this.”

  “I wonder if the idea of beginning actually fits any of this at all.”

  He murmured agreement. “Maybe not. Ever since St. Augustine in the fifth century A.D.—see, I’ve been reading up on this—Western thinkers saw time beginning with the creation of the universe. Nobody thought of it as like cell division, seeing it as just one more species coming into being from a parent.”

  She shrugged. “So okay, so I’m not the first goddess. Or the last. Just a member of the family.”

  “Sorry to steal some of your glory.” His warm hand patted hers.

  “Should I be blue about this? I don’t feel that way.”

 
“Because you’re well balanced. Not many could have goddesshood snatched away and stay cheerful.”

  “Cheerful? I haven’t got the energy for cheerful.”

  They all got out and walked back to the Cosm in the cold air. Alicia ate a crunchy breakfast bar beneath the sharp stars of a young universe.

  “Hey!” Zak said. They stood in the cold and looked at the black mass that seemed to fill the Cosm’s point of view. “We’re getting closer to the central black hole.”

  “Looks like,” Alicia said. “Max, what happens when we get there?”

  He stood very still. “I have a feeling I don’t want to find out.”

  The Cosm’s viewpoint was speeding through torrents of dark clouds now. The circles and grid brimmed on the horizon as it plunged toward the swelling black ahead. Bee-swarm motes whipped past, were gone before anyone could comprehend what they were. The sense of time accelerating was like plunging down a steep slope.

  “I wonder why the Cosm’s other end has never gotten swallowed by a star?” Zak said dreamily. “I mean, the odds are it should have.”

  Max said, “Maybe the other end repulses other masses. There are still a lot of possibilities, all allowed by the equations.”

  His voice sounded worried and Alicia slipped an arm around him. But she did not stop staring at the quickening spectacle brimming at the center of their circle. Pale ivory radiance fizzed and fought in the surface of the Cosm. She remembered how it had sparkled with an eerie luminosity the first time she had seen it. When it was young. That speckled brilliance was returning now, when the universe on the other end of the space-time neck was vastly aged.

  Max shifted uneasily. The Cosm’s glow brightened and flecks of all colors raced across it. It was so dazzling that she became aware of the flat droning sound only gradually.

  “What’s that?” Zak glanced upward.

  “That plane again,” Jill said.