Timelike Infinity

Chapter 12

Michael Poole followed Jasoft Parz, the strange bureaucrat from the future, through the entrails of the dead Spline.

They worked their way through gravity-free darkness broken only by the shifting, limited glow of the light globe Parz had rescued from his bizarre eyeball capsule; the semisentient device trailed Parz, doglike. The corridor they followed was circular in cross-section and a little more than head-high. Poole’s hands sank into walls of some grayish, oily substance, and he found himself worming his way past dark, floating ovals a foot or more wide. The ovals were harmless as long as he avoided them, but if he broke the crusty meniscus of any of them a thick, grainy blood-analogue flowed eagerly over his suit.

"Jesus," he muttered. "This is disgusting." Parz was a few yards ahead of him in the cloying darkness. He laughed, and spoke in his light, time-accented English. "No," he said. "This is life aboard the finest interstellar craft likely to be available to humans for generations to come — even after my time." Parz was a thin, dapper man of medium height; his receding hair was snow-white and his face was gloomy, downturned, his chin weak. He looked, Michael thought, like a caricature of an aging bureaucrat — a caricature saved only by his striking green eyes. Parz, in his clear, skintight environment suit, moved more easily through the claustrophobic, sticky conditions than did Poole in his bulky space-hardened gear; but Poole, watching Parz slide like a fish through the cloacal darkness, found himself relishing the cool dryness inside his suit, and would not have exchanged.

A fleshy flap a yard square opened in the floor of this tunnel-tube. Poole jumped back with a cry; ahead of him Parz halted and turned. Fist-sized globes of blood-analogue came quivering out of the flap, splashing stickily against Poole’s legs, and then out shot an antibody drone — one of the little robots that seemed to infest the carcass of this damn ship. This one was a flattened sphere about a foot across; it hurtled from wall to wall, rebounding. Then, for a moment, the drone hovered before Poole; tiny red laser-spots played over Poole’s shins and knees, and he tensed, expecting a lance of pain. But the laser-spots snapped away from him and played over the walls and blood globules like tiny searchlights.

The drone, jets sparkling, hurtled off down the passageway and out of sight.

Poole found himself trembling.

Parz laughed, irritatingly. "You shouldn’t worry about the drones. That one was just a simple maintenance unit—"

"With lasers."

"It was only using them for ranging information, Mr. Poole."

"And they couldn’t be used for any more offensive purposes, I suppose."

"Against us? The drones of this Spline are thoroughly used to humans, Mr. Poole. It probably thinks we’re part of a maintenance crew ourselves. They wouldn’t dream of attacking humans. Unless specifically ordered to, of course."

"That cheers me up," Poole said. "Anyway, what was it doing here? I thought you said the damn Spline is dead."

"Of course it is dead," Parz said with a trace of genteel impatience. "Ah, then, but what is death, to a being on this scale? The irruption of your GUT-drive craft into the heart of the Spline was enough to sever most of its command channels, disrupt most of its higher functions. Like snapping the spinal cord of a human. But—" Parz hesitated. "Mr. Poole, imagine putting a bullet in the brain of a tyrannosaurus. It’s effectively dead; its brain is destroyed. But how long will the processes of its body continue undirected, feedback loops striving blindly to restore some semblance of homeostasis? And the antibody drones are virtually autonomous — semisentient, some of them. With the extinguishing of the Spline’s consciousness they will be acting without central direction. Most of them will simply have ceased functioning. But the more advanced among them — like our little visitor just now — don’t have to wait to be told what to do; they actively prowl the body of the Spline, seeking out functions to perform, repairs to initiate. It’s all a bit anarchic, I suppose, but it’s also highly effective. Flexible, responsive, mobile, heuristic, with intelligence distributed to the lowest level… A bit like an ideal human society, I suppose; free individuals seeking out ways to advance the common good." Parz’s laugh was delicate, almost effete, thought Poole. "Perhaps we should hope, as one sentient species considering another, that the drones find tasks sufficient to give their lives meaning while they remain aware."

Poole frowned, studying Parz’s round, serious face. He found Jasoft Parz oddly repellent, like an insect; his humor was too dry for Poole’s taste, and his view of the world somehow oversophisticated, ironic, detached from the direct, ordinary concerns of human perception.

Here is a man, Poole thought, who has distanced himself from his own emotions. He has become as alien as the Qax. The world is a game to him, an abstract puzzle to be solved — no, not even that — to be admired dustily, as one might marvel at the recorded moves of some ancient chess game.

No doubt it had been an effective survival strategy for someone in Parz’s line of work. Poole found a grain of pity in his heart for the man of the future.

Parz, proceeding ahead of Poole along the tunnel, continued to speak. "I’ve never been aboard a dead Spline before, Mr. Poole; I suspect it could be days before the normal functions close down completely. So you’ll continue to see signs of life for some time." He sniffed. "Eventually, of course, it will be unviable. The vacuum will penetrate its deepest recesses; we will witness a race between corruption and ice…" He hesitated. "There are other ships in the area that could take us off? Human ships of this era, I mean."

Poole laughed. "A whole flotilla of them, flying every flag in the system. A damn lot of use they’ve been." But the key battles had been over in minutes, long before most of the inner System worlds were even aware of the invasion of the future. But, Poole had learned, the space battles had made spectacular viewing, projected live in huge Virtuals in the skies of the planets… "We’ve asked them to hold off for a few more hours, until we finish this investigation; we wanted to make sure this thing is safe — dead, deactivated — before letting anyone else aboard."

"Oh, I think it’s safe," Parz said dryly. "If the Spline could still strike at you, be assured you’d be dead by now. Ah," he said, "here we are."

Abruptly the veinlike tunnel opened out around Jasoft. He drifted into empty space, his light globe following patiently. The white light of the globe shone feebly over the walls of a cavern that Poole, peering carefully forward from the tunnel, estimated to be about a quarter mile across. The walls were pink and shot through with crimson veins as thick as Poole’s arms; blood-analogue still pulsed along the wider tubes, he noticed, and quivering globes of the blood substance, some of them yards across, drifted like stately galleons through the darkness.

But there was damage. In the dim light cast by the globe lamp, Poole made out a spear of metal yards wide that lanced across the chamber, from one ripped wall to another: the spine of the embedded Crab. The lining of the chamber had done its best to seal itself around the entrance and exit wounds, so that a tide of flesh lapped around the Crab spine at each extremity. And even now Poole could make out the fleeting shadows of drones — dozens of them — drifting around the spine, sparking with reaction jets and laser light as they toiled, too late, to drive out this monstrous splinter. Poole stared up at the immense intrusion, the huge wounds, with a kind of wonder; even the spine’s straight lines seemed a violation, hard and painfully unnatural, in this soft place of curved walls and flesh.

He unwrapped a line from his waist and fixed one end to the pulsing wall of the chamber. As the jaws of the clip bit, Poole found himself wincing, but he forced himself to tug at the clip, feeling its strong teeth tear a little into the Spline’s flesh, before he felt confident enough to push himself away from the wall after Parz.

Parz, propelled by some subtle reaction-pack built onto the spine of his skinsuit, swam with a stiff grace around the chamber. His skinsuit was slick with gobbets of blood-analogue, Poole noticed, giving Parz the odd and obscene appearance of something newborn. "This is the stomach chamber," Parz said. "The Spline’s main — ah — hold, if you will. Where the Qax would customarily reside. At least, the Occupation-era Qax I have described; the turbulent-fluid beings."

Poole glanced around the dim recesses of the space; it was like some ugly, fleshy cathedral. "I guess they needed the elbow room."

Parz glanced across at Poole; the shadows cast by the floating globe threw the age lines of his face into sharp relief. His green eyes glimmered, startling. "You shouldn’t be surprised to feel uncomfortable, moving through this Spline, Mr. Poole. It’s not a human environment. No attempt has been made to adapt it to human needs, or human sensibilities." His face seemed to soften, then, and Poole tried to read his expression in the uncertain light. "You know, I’d give a lot to see the Spline of a few centuries from now. From my time," he corrected himself absently. "After the overthrow of the Qax, when human engineers adapt the Splines for our own purposes. Tiled vein corridors; metal-walled stomach chambers—"

"The overthrow of the Qax?" Poole asked sharply. "Parz, what do you know about the overthrow of the Qax?"

Parz smiled dreamily. "Only what I was told by the Governor of Occupied Earth… The second Governor, that is. Only what it told me of the future, when it was convinced I would die before seeing another human."

Poole felt blood pulse in the veins of his neck. "Jasoft, for the first time I’m glad I rescued you from that damn ridiculous eyeball."

Parz turned away. Half swimming, he made his way toward one section of the stomach-chamber wall, some way from the areas violated by the irruption of the Crab. He came to rest beside a metal canister, a coffin-sized box that was fixed to the fleshy wall by a web of metal strands.

"What is it?" Poole asked. "Have you found something?" Clumsily he made his way across the deserted space of the chamber toward Parz.

The two of them huddled over the box, the light globe hovering close like a faithful dog; the small tent of light cast over them was strangely intimate. Parz ran quick, practiced hands over the box, fingering telltale touch-screens that, Poole noticed, refused to light. His face was quite clear to Poole, but his expression was neutral. Unreadable.

Parz said, " ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.’ "

"What?"

"This is Qax." He slapped the box with one gloved palm. "The Governor of Earth. Dead, harmless…"

"How?"

"The Qax preferred to run their Spline craft by direct conscious control, with their own awareness alongside — complementing and directing — the continuing sentience of the Spline."

Poole frowned. "Can’t have been comfortable for the Spline."

"The Spline didn’t have much choice," said Parz. "It’s an efficient method. But not without its risks.

"When the collision with your ship terminated the Spline’s higher functions, perhaps the Qax could have disengaged. But it didn’t. Driven by its hatred — and, perhaps, by hubris, right to the end — it stayed locked inside the Spline’s sensorium. And when the ship died, the Qax died with it."

Poole fingered the metal webbing, thoughtfully. "I wonder if the Spline could be salvaged, somehow. After all, the hyperdrive alone is worth centuries of research. Maybe we could link up the Crab’s AI to what’s left of the Spline’s functions."

Parz frowned. "But if the Qax’s method is any guide, you need a sophisticated conscious entity as a front end, something that can feel its way into what’s left of the Spline’s — identity. Sympathetically. Do you understand?"

Poole nodded, smiling. "I think so. And I know just the conscious entity to try it."

Parz was silent for a moment. His gloved fingers stroked the surface of the metal canister almost tenderly, and he seemed to be rocking in the thick intestinal air. Poole leaned closer, trying to read Parz’s expression; but the half-shadowed face, with its mask of age tightened by AS, was as empty as it had ever been. "Jasoft? What are you thinking?"

Parz looked up at him. "Why," he said with a note of surprise, "I think I’m mourning."

"Mourning a Qax?" A creature, thought Poole, whose fellows had turned Earth’s cities to glass — who would have, given a little more fortune, scraped humanity out of the Solar System before most people had even learned the name of their destroyers — and who had turned Parz himself into a quisling, a man unable even to face his true self… "Jasoft, are you crazy?"

Parz shook his head slowly; folds of the clear skinsuit creased at his neck. "Poole, one day humans are going to cause the destruction of the Qax’s home world. We’ll almost wipe them out.

"…But they’re unique. There are only — have only ever been — a few hundred of them. Yet each one has the seed of immortality — the potential to live long enough to witness star-corpses shine by proton decay.

"Poole, this is the second Qax I’ve seen die." Parz bent his head to the metal case, apparently looking inward. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I’m mourning."

Poole stayed with him in the silence of the dead Spline.

Miriam Berg, Jaar at her side, walked into the devastated heart of Stonehenge.

The ground had been ripped open, wadded into thick furrows; grass clung to the broken turf like hair to flesh. And the ancient stones had been scattered like matchsticks, shivered to rubble by the casual brush of a gravity-wave starbreaker beam.

Jaar touched her shoulder and pointed into the sky, toward the bulk of Jupiter. "Look up there," he said.

Miriam stared hard along the line of his long arm, crumpling her eyes with the effort. There was a shadow: a boxy, rough rectangle, a silhouette against the gaudy pink of Jupiter, turning slowly as it sailed away from the earth-craft. "The last of the henge," she said.

"Well, at least one of the old stones has survived. It will sail around Jupiter for a hundred thousand years, perhaps."

Berg shook her head. "Damn it. I should feel happier, I guess. We’ve saved the human race!… but what a cost."

Jaar inclined his head toward her with awkward tenderness. "Miriam, I think the first builders of this old henge — had they been able to imagine it — would have been happy with such a monument as that orbiting menhir."

"Maybe." Miriam stared around at what was left of the earth-craft. The Xeelee-material huts of the Friends had been flattened like canvas tents in a gale; she could see Friends picking sadly through the debris. Although the earth-craft’s essential life-support equipment had survived inside the singularity-plane chamber, she knew that most of the Friends’ personal possessions had been abandoned up here during the assault: clothes, their records of families and places lost fifteen centuries in the future — much that made life worth living from day to day, when there was time for less weighty concerns than the fate of the universe.

Berg found herself shivering; her chest and lungs — which had not healed properly following her leap out to the edge of the atmosphere during the attack — ached dully, a constant, brooding presence. And the air of the craft was noticeably thinner, now. The weakening of the earth-craft’s gravity field, as generated by the devastated plane of singularities, was marked; in some places the craft had been rendered virtually uninhabitable. The Friends’ latest estimate was that fully forty percent of their stock of singularities had been fired away or lost while the Spline starbreakers had riffled through the craft’s defenses like fingers through paper. Many of the singularities launched before Berg had made it into the dome had hit their primary target: Jupiter, it seemed, had probably been seeded with enough singularities to cause its ultimate implosion, and — one day, centuries away — there would be a single, spinning singularity on the site now occupied by the greatest planet. But the singularity wouldn’t be of the right size, or the right spin, or whatever the hell were the mysterious success criteria the Friends had laid down for themselves. And now there weren’t enough singularities left for them to finish the job.

"So," she said to Jaar. "What next, for the Friends of Wigner?"

He smiled a little wistfully, his large, fragile-looking head swiveling as he surveyed the battered earth-craft. "The craft has suffered too much damage to remain habitable for long—"

"Atmosphere leakage?"

He looked at her. "Yes, but more significantly the loss of the hyperdrive when the construction-material dome was crushed—" He closed his long fingers into a fist. "And without the hyperdrive we have no effective radiation shielding. This skimpy blanket of atmosphere will scarcely suffice to protect us in Jovian space, and I doubt if we could survive even one close encounter with the Io flux tube."

"Right." Berg looked up at the sky nervously. Suddenly her situation — the fact that she was standing on a lump of rock, lost in orbit around Jupiter, with nothing over her head but a few wisps of gas — seemed harshly real; the sky seemed very close, very threatening.

"Well have to evacuate, of course," Jaar said stiffly. "We will accept assistance from your contemporaries, Miriam. If we may."

"You needn’t fear," she said as kindly as she could. "I’ll speak to Michael, if you’ll let me; he can intercede with the authorities. There are plenty of ships in the area."

"Thank you."

"And then what, Jaar?"

"Then we go on." His brown eyes were pale and intense and filled once more with unshakable faith; she found herself returning his gaze uncomfortably. "We find a way to resume the Project."

"But, Jaar—" She shook her head. "Your Project has nearly brought disaster down on us all already. Hasn’t it? You mustn’t lose sight of this simple fact, my friend — we were lucky to defeat the Qax invasion from the future. If they hadn’t been so slow to react, so complacent, so sure we had no threat to offer them — then they could have destroyed the race. Is your Project worth such a risk again?"

Jaar replied with intensity, "Berg, your words in the singularity chamber, at the height of the struggle with the Spline — that I must survive, in order to fight another day, to continue with the Project — changed me, convinced me. Yes, the Project is worth all of that. It’s worth any risk — believe me, any price."

"Look, I said all that when the roof was caving in. Literally. It was a ploy, Jaar. I was trying to manipulate you, to get you to fight, to make you do what I wanted you to do."

"I know that." He smiled. "Of course I know that. But the motives behind your words don’t reduce their truth. Don’t you see that?"

She studied his long, certain face, and wrapped her arms closely around her, troubled.

Harry Poole, downloaded into the nervous system of the Spline, was in agony.

Jesus Christ -

The Spline’s body and sensorium encased him like the inside of his own (corporeal) head. He felt its vast, intimidating bulk all around him; the toughened outer flesh-hull felt as if it were third-degree burnt; the weapons and sensor spots were like open wounds.

The Spline must be in constant, continual pain, he realized; yes, they had been adapted for survival in space and hyperspace, but clumsily, he saw now. He felt like an amputee, nerve ends crudely welded to steamhammers and jacks.

Was this a price worth paying, even for special longevity?… and the Qax must have endured this horror too. Then again, he thought, perhaps pain had a different meaning for one as alien as a Qax.

In addition to the routine life agonies of the Spline there was more torment: from the half-healed wounds in the hull inflicted by its close encounter with the exotic material of the Interface portal; from the wreckage of the Crab that was still lodged within the Spline’s fleshy bulk like a clumsy arrow.

The shock of Poole’s crude attack had been enough to kill the Spline. The pain Harry suffered now was like the agony of a new birth, into a universe of darkness and terror.

…And yet, as he became accustomed to the size and scale of the Spline, to the constant, wailing screech of pain, Harry became aware of — compensating factors.

Some of his sensors — even some of the Spline’s ancient, original eyes, like the one ravaged by Jasoft Parz — still worked. He saw the stars through the eyes of a sentient starship; they were remote yet accessible, like youthful ideals. He could still turn; the Spline could roll. Vast, hidden flywheels of bone moved somewhere inside him, and space slid past his hull; he felt the centrifugal wrench of rotation as if the stars themselves were rolling around him, tugging.

And burning like a fire in his gut, he felt the power of the hyperdrive. Cautiously he flexed those strange, indirect muscles; and he thrilled at the power he could direct — the power to unravel the dimensions of spacetime itself.

Yes, there was grandeur to be a Spline.

He opened pixel eyes inside the lifedome of the wrecked Crab. His son was staring up at him. "I can fly," Harry said.

Jasoft Parz had shed his skinsuit, snakelike; now he floated in the air, one of Michael’s roomier dressing gowns billowing around him. "From what your companion Berg reports, these Friends of Wigner sound determined to revive their Project."

Michael Poole lay back in his couch in the Crab’s lifedome and steepled his fingers behind his head. "But the Friends are going to need access to singularity manufacturing technology on an industrial scale, if they are to rebuild their earth-craft. And that surely means keeping the Interface access to the future open. We simply don’t have the infrastructure for such an endeavor, in this time period."

Harry, his huge Virtual head floating in the air above Poole’s couch, nodded wisely. "But then we’re leaving the door unlocked against whatever else the Qax choose to throw down their wormhole pipe at us. Not to mention any companions of Miss Splendid Isolation over there." He nodded toward Shira; the girl from the earth-craft sat at a data console scrolling idly through some of Michael’s research results, studiously ignoring the conversation.

Parz said, "The Qax were utterly complacent in their invasion of this time frame. And so — perhaps — no message, no report of the disaster, was sent back through the Interface to my era. But the Qax Occupation authorities will surely send through more probes, to investigate the outcome. We have bought time with our victory; but no more, as long as the Interface remains open."

Shira looked up; Michael absently noted how the light of Jupiter highlighted the graceful curves of her shaven cranium. "Are you so sure you can close the portal?" she asked quietly. "You designed it, Michael Poole; you must know that spacetime wormholes are not hinged hatches one can open and close at will."

"We’ll find a way, if we have to," Michael said seriously.

"And if the Qax, or the Friends of the future, choose not to allow it?"

"Believe me. We’ll find a way."

Parz nodded, his green eyes narrow. "Yes. But perhaps we should begin considering now how to do such a thing. We may need the option rapidly, should we decide to use it — or should it become necessary to do so."

Harry opened a pixel-blurred mouth and laughed. "In case of emergency, break laws of physics."

"Start working on it, Harry," Michael said wearily. "Shira, it’s not impossible. Wormholes are inherently unstable. Active feedback has to be built into the design, to enable a hole to endure…"

But Shira had turned away again and was bent over her data. In the semidarkness of the lifedome, with her face lit from beneath by the pink-blue glow of Poole’s old data, her eyes were huge and liquid.

She was shutting them out once more.

"If only the Friends would let us in on their secret," Michael said, half to himself. "Then perhaps we could assess the risks, analyze the potential benefits against the likely costs of allowing them to go ahead."

"But they won’t," Harry said. "All they’ll tell us is how the Project will make it all right in the end."

"Yes," Parz said. "One senses from their words that it is as if the Project will not merely justify any means, any sacrifice — but will somehow nullify the sacrifice itself, in its unraveling." He looked at Michael. "Is that possible?"

Michael sighed, feeling very tired, very old; the weight of centuries pressed down on him, evidently unnoticed by the Virtual copy of his father, by this faded bureaucrat, by the baffling, enigmatic girl from fifteen centuries away. "If they won’t tell us what they’re up to, maybe we can try to work it out. We know that the core of the Project is the implosion, the induced gravitational collapse of Jupiter, by the implanting of seed singularities."

"Yes," Parz said. "But there is a subtle design. We know already that the precise form of that collapse — the parameters of the resulting singularity — is vital to the success of the Project. And that’s what they hoped to engineer with their singularity bullets."

Harry frowned hugely. "What’s the point? One singularity is much like another. Isn’t it? I mean, a black hole is black."

Michael shook his head. "Harry, a lot of information gets lost, destroyed, when a black hole forms from a collapsing object. A black hole forming is like an irruption of increased entropy into the universe. But there are still three distinguishing quantities associated with any hole: its mass, its electrical charge, and its spin."

A nonrotating, electrically neutral hole, Michael said, would have a spherical event horizon — the Schwarzchild solution to Einstein’s ancient, durable equations of general relativity. But a rotating, charged object left behind a Kerr-Newman hole: a more general solution to the equations, a nonspherical horizon.

Parz was performing gentle, weightless somersaults; he looked like a small, sleek animal. "Kerr-Newman predicts that if one may choose mass, charge, and spin, one may sculpt event horizons."

Harry smiled slowly. "So you can customize a hole. But my question still stands: so what?"

"One could go further," Parz said, still languidly somersaulting. "One could construct a naked singularity."

"A naked singularity?"

Michael sighed. "All right, Harry. Think of the formation of a hole again: the implosion of a massive object, the formation of an event horizon.

"But, within the event horizon, the story isn’t over yet. The matter of the dead star keeps imploding; nothing — not pressure from the heat of the core, not even the Pauli exclusion principle — can keep it from collapsing all the way."

Harry frowned. "All the way to what?"

"A singularity. A flaw in spacetime; a place where spacetime quantities — mass/energy density, space curvature — all go off the scale, to infinity. Inside a well-behaved black hole, the singularity is effectively cloaked from the rest of the universe by the event horizon. The horizon renders us safe from the damage the singularity can do. But there are ways for singularities to form without a cloaking event horizon — to be ‘naked.’ If a star is spinning rapidly enough before its collapse, for instance… Or if the mass distribution is not compact enough in the first place — if it is elongated, or spiky—"

The singularity in such a solution wouldn’t be a point, as would form at the center of a spherically symmetric, nonrotating star. Instead, the material of the star would collapse to a thin disk — like a pancake — and the singularity would form within the pancake, and along a spike through the axis of the pancake — a spindle of flawed spacetime.

The naked singularity would be unstable, probably — it would rapidly collapse within an event horizon — but it would last long enough to do a lot of damage -

Harry frowned. "I don’t like the sound of that. What damage?"

Poole locked his hands behind his head. "How can I explain this? Harry, it’s all to do with boundary conditions…"

Spacetime could only evolve in an orderly and predictable way if its boundaries, in space and time, were themselves orderly. The boundaries had to satisfy criteria of regularity called Cauchy conditions; causality itself could only flow from stable Cauchy boundaries.

There were three types of boundary. In the beginning there was the initial singularity — the Big Bang, from which the universe expanded. That was one boundary: the start of time.

Then there were boundaries at infinity. Spacelike infinity contained all the places infinitely remote from the observer… and there was a boundary far upwhen, at timelike infinity. At the end of all world lines.

The initial singularity, and the boundaries at spacelike and timelike infinity, were all Cauchy boundaries…

But there was a third class of boundary.

Naked singularities.

"It sounds fantastic," Harry said.

"Maybe it is. But nobody can think of any reason why such objects shouldn’t form. There are some quite easy ways for this to happen, if you wait long enough. You know that black holes aren’t really ‘black,’ that they have a temperature—"

"Yes. Hawking evaporation. Just like the holes in the earth-craft."

"Small holes like those in the earth-craft’s singularity plane will simply implode when they have evaporated completely. But in the far future, when the singularities at the heart of galaxy-mass holes begin to emerge from within their evaporating horizons -

"Harry, naked singularities are non-Cauchy boundaries to spacetime. There is no order, no pattern to the spacetime that might evolve from a naked singularity; we can’t make any causal predictions about events. Some theorists hold that if a naked singularity were to form, then spacetime — the universe — would simply be destroyed."

"Jesus. Then maybe naked singularities can’t form after all?"

"You should have been a philosopher, Harry."

"I should?"

"That’s the principle of Cosmic Censorship — that there’s something out there, something like the Pauli principle maybe, which would stop the formation of naked flaws. That’s one theory."

"Yeah. But who is this Cosmic Censor? And can we trust him?"

"The trouble is that we can think of too many ways for naked singularities to be formed. And nobody can think of a particularly intelligent mechanism for the Cosmic Censorship to work…"

Parz, hovering, had listened to all this with veined eyelids closed. "Indeed. And perhaps that is the goal of the Friends."

Michael felt the pieces of the puzzle sliding around in his head. "My God," he said softly. "They’ve hinted at a power over history. Do you think they could be so stupid?" He looked up at the Virtual. "Harry, maybe the Friends are trying to change history with a naked singularity…"

"But they could never control it," Parz said, eyes still closed. "It would be utterly random. At best, like lobbing a grenade into a political discussion. It will change the agenda, yes, but in an utterly discontinuous fashion. And at worst—"

"At worst they could wreck spacetime," Michael said.

Harry looked down at him, pixel-blurred, but serious and calm. "What do we do, Michael? Do we help them?"

"Like hell," Michael said quietly. "We have to stop them."

Shira looked up from her data screens, her long neck seeming to uncoil. "You don’t understand," she said calmly. "You’re wrong."

"Then you’ll have to explain it to me," Michael said tiredly. "Harry, do you have that option I asked for?"

Harry’s smile was strained. "We can close the Interface, the AIs say. But I don’t understand how. And I don’t think you’re going to like the solution."

Michael felt an enormous, oppressive weight; it seemed to be striving to crush his chest. "I don’t like any of this. But we’re going to do it anyway. Harry, start when you can."

He closed his eyes and lay back in the couch, hoping for sleep to claim him. After a few seconds the surge of the Spline’s insystem drive pressed him deeper into the cushions.