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"Unless accidents are God's way of dodging responsibility."
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GREGORY BENFORD ·
"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 goddess-hood 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 us 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 tiqere?"
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
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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.
"Two of them," Zak said, looking up. "There."
The dots of light came bearing directly down on them. "One's a chopper," Zak
called.
The airplane swept directly overhead, spotlights on. They all closed their
eyes as it passed, to keep some of their night vision. Alicia was torn between
watching the Cosm and the angry buzzing overhead.
Max didn't even look up. "I have no idea, no theory, to deal with what happens
when a space-time nugget like this gets swallowed by a large-scale
contortion..."
"It's gonna land!" Jill shouted against the gathering roar.
Searchlights swept the area in a hard glare. Alicia thought she would be
unable to see anything in the Cosm at all now, but when she looked down, her
hands shielding her face, the sphere was alive with working blue-green
tendrils, like a strange standing lightning.
"Get away!" Max shouted against the hammering racket of the helicopter. It was
landing a hundred meters away, blowing grit in their faces.
"We can't escape them," Jill said.
"Away from the Cosm!"
For a long moment she hesitated, gripped by the cascading, accelerating pace
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