The Draco Tavern - Larry Niven [47]
The jellyfish spoke like a snore. Its translator asked, “But this entity could visit Poseidon?”
“One of our ships might cross to Poseidon’s world. We would prefer to visit Poseidon before he dies. Wait but a moment.” The Chirp’s monitor strip twinkled.
Herman took the opportunity to half-whisper, “We’ve been talking about water worlds. That’s Scylla. Nothing to trade, but supposed to be a poet. Poseidon lives on a water world not far from here. He’s huge.”
The Chirp said, “No such voyage is now planned. Learning to talk again to another of his species would be tedious, but we estimate Poseidon’s life span in the thousands of years.”
“But mine is not,” Scylla the jellyfish said.
“We are sorry. Greeting, Rick.”
“Greeting, elder. Greet Roger Teng-Hui and the Terminator Beaver.”
“Greet you both. Greet Scylla, whose kind only recently made fire. A great accomplishment it was.”
We spoke; the translators spoke; talk grew raucous, then stalled. Into a moment’s pause I asked, “What’s the largest life-form the Chirpsithra know of?”
“Extinct now,” the Chirp said. “They were larger than galaxies. They formed the galaxies. Your telescopes will one day be powerful enough to watch them. Would you witness this now?”
Teng wanted to speak. The Beaver wanted to speak. But they both looked at me first, and Scylla’s snore rang out. “Please show us this wonder.”
“Our monitors ... but you have a local computer, I see.” The creature’s long red armored hand reached out for the Beaver’s Macintosh computer and opened it facing the jellyfish. “Do not disconnect.” The Chirp produced a little box of its own and plugged it into a piece of the Beaver’s equipment. Her fingers played over a surface.
The Beaver was still attached; he twitched. The Mac’s screen raced, went black, then blue-white. “Fast-forward,” the Chirp said.
We watched. A wash of violet light dimmed to blue, to green, to yellow, then broke into an expanding chaos of filaments and dimmed further.
The Chirp’s translator spoke. “Roger Teng-Hui, how do galaxies form?”
Teng said, “It’s a puzzle. Current attempts to model the early universe usually give us a universe that is too uniform to form galaxies. Inflationary theories make galaxies more likely. It’s one of the attractive things about inflation.”
She said, “You have not yet seen the universe forming. It was too uniform. Without galaxies there would be few stars, yet galaxies would never form. But like all here—even Scylla, whose sea-locked kind breed transparent jellyfish to make ever more powerful telescopes—we became able to watch.”
Out of the chaos came whirlpools of light.
“It may be you cannot see the mechanism. Teng, your people have wondered about the missing mass.” Teng recoiled; she chittered laughter. “What is unfalsifiable might still be proven true.”
“You’ve been eavesdropping,” I said.
“Our translators note key phrases, as ‘missing mass’ in conjunction with ‘energy of empty space.’ If engineers must use the power in the vacuum, and those engineers are yet to evolve, then they will be undiscoverable. But these life-forms we call the Firstborn evolved very early. They metabolized the energy of the vacuum. Wherever there was a bloom of Firstborn, an orgy of uncontrolled breeding, there too were sudden concentrations of mass. Disappearance of volume leaves mass behind, yes? There sudden stars flowered.
“We would study the Firstborn further, but we cannot find them. We fear them extinct. During formation of a galaxy the rage of light and heat may kill them, or else matter around them might grow denser until a black hole swallows all and remains behind to anchor newly forming stars.
“Yet we hope that they still survive between galactic clusters. See this great emptiness—” She