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the heat produced it was as if the radiationcooled the gas cloud. The residual heat left in the cloud
eventually balanced the gravitational attraction, and equilibrium was found: a star formed.
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But dark matter could not produce electromagnetic radiation. And without the cooling effect of the
radiation, a dark matter cloud, collapsing under gravity, trapped much more of its heat of contraction. As
a result, much larger clouds larger than galaxies were the equilibrium form for dark matter.
So the early Universe had been populated by immense, cold, bland clouds of dark matter: it had been a
cosmos almost without structure.
Then the baryonic matter had gathered, and the stars began to implode to shine. Lieserl imagined the
first stars sparking to life across the cosmos, tiny pinprick gravity wells in the smooth oceans of dark
matter.
The photino birds lived off a trickle of proton-photino interactions, which fed them with a slow, steady
drip of energy. And to get a sufficient flow of energy the birds neededdense matter densities which
could not have formed without baryonic structures.
And the birds' dependence on baryonic matter extended further. She knew that the birds needed
templates of baryonic material even to reproduce.
So baryonic-matter stars had given the photino birds their very being, and now fed them and enabled
them to reproduce.
Lieserl brooded. A fine hypothesis. Butwhy, then, should the birds be so eager to kill off their
mother-stars?
Once more the chatter of the humans from theNorthern passed through her sensorium, barely
registering. They were asking her more questions requesting more detailed forecasts of the likely future
evolution of the suffering Sun.
She sailed moodily around the core, thinking about stars and the photino birds.
And her mind made connections it had failed to complete before in millions of years.
At last, she saw it: the full, bleak picture.
And, suddenly, it seemed urgent terribly urgent to answer the humans' questions about the future.
She hurried to the base of her convection cells.
The shower's needle-sharp jets of water sprayed over Louise's skin. She floated there at the center of
the shower cubicle, listening to the shrill gurgle of the water as it was pumped out of the booth. She lifted
her arms up and let the water play over her belly and chest; it was hot enough, the pressure sufficiently
high, to make her battered old skin tingle, as if it were being worked over by a thousand tiny masseurs.
She hated being in zero-gee. She always had, and she hated it still; she even loathed having to have a
pump to suck the water out of her shower for her. She'd insisted on having this shower installed,
curtained off in one corner of the life-lounge, as her one concession to luxury no, damn it,she thought,
this is no luxury; the shower is my concession to what's left of my humanity.
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A hot shower was one of the few sensual experiences that had remainedvivid, as she'd got so absurdly
old. High-pressure, steaming water could still cut through the patina of age which deadened her skin.
There was hardly anything else left. Since her sense of smell had finally packed up, eating had become a
process of basic refuelling, to be endured rather than enjoyed. And, apart from her Virtuals, nothing
much stimulated her mentally; it would take more than a thousand-year life to exhaust the libraries of
mankind, but she'd long since wearied of the ancient, frozen thoughts of others, rendered irrelevant by the
death of the Sun.
She turned off the spigot. Hot air gushed down around her, drying her rapidly. When the droplets had
stopped floating off her skin she pulled back the shower curtain.
The lounge was basic it contained little more than this shower, a small galley, a sleeping cocoon and
her data desk with its processor bank. Lashed up in haste from sections of theNorthern's hull material,
the lounge was a squat cylinder five yards across, crouched on the shoulders of the Xeelee craft like a
malevolent parasite utterly spoiling the lines of the delicate nightfighter, Louise had thought regretfully.
The walls of the lounge were opaqued to a featureless gray, making the lounge rather dingy and
claustrophobic. And the place was a mess. Bits of her clothing drifted around in the air, crumpled and
soiled, and she was conscious of a stale smell. She really ought to clean up; she knew she utterly lacked
the obsessive neatness needed to survive for long in zero gee.
She reached for a towel drifting in the air close by. She rubbed herself vigorously, relishing the feeling of
the rough fabric on her skin. A mere blast of air never left her feeling reallydry.
The feel of the warm towel on her skin made her think, distantly, about sex.
She'd always had a sour public persona: people saw her as an engineer obsessed with her job, with [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]