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moment you left. You don't have to worry about your friends missing
you; no matter how many hours you generously stay with us, we'll get you
to Tau Ceti at the time you're expected."
"This is incredible."
Glass shrugged. "It's science."
"It's magic," said Keith.
Glass shrugged again. "Same thing."
"But--but--if you're really me, if you're really from
Earth, then why did you screw up on the simulation?"
"Pardon?"
"The Earth simulation. It has errors in it. Fields full of four-leaf
clover, something only ever found as the occasional mutant, and birds
that I've never seen before."
"Oh." The wind-chime sound. "My mistake. I took the simulation from
some ancient recordings we had, but I was probably a bit sloppy. Let me
just check with my reckoner . . . yup, my fault. It is a perfect
simulation of Earth, but of Earth about one-point-two million years
after you were born. The things that were out of place were species
that hadn't yet evolved in your time. Come to think of it, you wouldn't
have recognized the constellations, either, if I'd ever let it become
nighttime."
"My God," said Keith. "I hadn't even begun to think about evolution.
If you're ten billion years older than me, then--then you're older than
any form of life on Earth in my time."
Glass nodded. "By your time, life had been evolving on Earth for four
billion years. But there are Earth-descended life-forms in this time
that are products of fourteen billion years of evolution. You'll never
believe what daisies evolved into--or sea anemones, or the bacteria that
caused whooping cough. In fact, I had lunch a few days ago with someone
who evolved from whooping-cough bacteria."
"You're kidding."
"No, I'm not."
"But it's incredible . . ."
"No. It's just time. Lots and lots of time."
"What about humans? Did humans continue to breed, to have children?
Or did that stop when--when life prolongation was discovered?"
"No, humanity continues to evolve and change. New humans--those who've
been evolving for the last ten billion years--don't mix much with old
humans like me.
They're . . . quite different."
"But if you're me, how did you change? I mean, your body is
see-through."
Glass shrugged. "Technology. Flesh and blood tends to wear out; this
is better. In fact, I can reconfigure myself any way I want.
Transparent is in style right now, but ! think the hint of aquamarine
is quite classy, don't you?"
Chapter XVI
Rissa, Hek, and the rest of the alien-communications team continued to
exchange messages with the darmat they'd dubbed Cat's Eye. The
conversation became increasingly fluid as new words were added to the
translation database, or old words had their meanings refined. When
Keith next came onto the bridge, Rissa was in the middle of an
apparently philosophic conversation with the giant being.
The usual alpha-shift crew was on duty, except that the ExOps station
was vacant: Rhombus was off doing something else, and his position had
been slaved to a dolphin floating in the open pool on the starboard side
of the bridge.
"We have been unaware of your existence," Rissa said into the microphone
stalk rising from her console. "We knew a large amount of invisible
matter was out there, because of the gravitational effects, but we
didn't know it was alive."
"Two types of substance," replied the darmat in that French accent
PHANTOM had assigned to him.
"Yes," said Rissa. She looked up and waved a greeting at Keith as he
took his seat next to her.
"Not react sharply," said the Cat's Eye. "Only gravity the same."
"That's correct," said Rissa. The all-encompassing hologram showed an
enhanced view of Cat's Eye in front of the cluster of workstations.
"Most like us," said the darmat.
"The vast majority of all matter is like you, yes," replied Rissa.
"Ignore you."
"You've ignored us?"
"Insignificant."
"Were you aware that part of our type of substance was alive?"
"No. Not occur to look for life on planets. So small you are."
"We. wish to have a relationship with you," said Rissa.
"Relationship?"
"For mutual benefit. One plus one equals two. You plus us equals more
than two."
"Understand. More than the sum of the parts."
Rissa smiled. "Exactly."
"Relationship sensible."
"Do you have a word for those with whom you have mutually beneficial
relationships?"
"Friends," said the darmat, PHANTOM translating the word the first time
it had been received. "We call them friends."
"We are friends," said Rissa.
"Yes."
"The kind of material you're made out of--the material we call dark
matter--is all of it alive?"
"No. Only tiny fraction."
"But you say there has been living dark matter for a very long time?"
"Since the beginning."
"Beginning of what?"
"Of--all the stars combined."
"Of the totality of everything? We call that the universe."
"Since the beginning of the universe."
"That's an interesting point right there," said Jag, sitting on Keith's
left. "The idea that the universe had a beginning--it did, of course,
but how does it know that?
Ask it about that."
"What was the universe like in the beginning?" said Rissa into the
mike.
"Compressed," said the darmat. "Small beyond small.
One place, no time."
"The primordial atom," said Jag. "Fascinating. It's right, but I
wonder how such a creature would deduce that?"
"They communicate by radio," said Lianne, turning around at InOps to
face Jag. "They probably reasoned it out the same way we did: from the
cosmic microwave background and the redshifting of radio noise from
distant galaxies'."
Jag grunted.
Rissa continued her dialogue: "You have told us that neither you
personally, Cat's Eye, nor this group of darmats is anywhere near that
old. How do you know that darmat life existed all the way back to the
beginning."
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