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with Zak, viewing time-chopped segments on a high-quality screen tucked into a
corner of the observatory. Stars blazed as they arced, their immense
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reservoirs of energy dissipating as quickly their bulk allowed. A few weeks
before they had found a star that spectral lines said was over ten billion
years old, nearing the end of its life span. Already it was beginning to burn
heavier and heavier elements at its core, growing hotter. Its atmospheric
envelope of already incandescent gas heated, swelling as they watched. From a
mild-mannered, yellow-white star, it bloated within minutes into a reddened
giant.
"If it has planets," Zak said, "they're being swallowed right now."
Alicia tried to imagine first Mercury, then Venus, then Earth beneath a
glaring red sky, its crust roasting, its oceans and air boiled away by a huge
angry sun.
Then the star whirled away, swept out of view by the rotation of its galaxy.
If it had a solar system, then its planets, once a grand stage,
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COSM
would be withered relics beside a guttering campfire.
During the last week, the Cosm's point of view at its other end had slowly
drifted down into the plane of a giant elliptical galaxy. An astrophysicist's
career could be made with the data on that process alone, as the invisible
frictions of dust and magnetic fields nudged matter into the bee-swarm blender
of a thousand billion suns. Until now, astronomers had been able to take only
snapshots of the stellar dance and from that had to deduce the music of the
spheres. Now the Cosm's time acceleration gave entire concerts as masses swept
together and apart, bristling with suns both fresh and dying in furious gulfs.
Zak loved to examine under high magnification the flaring of supernovae as
giant stars blew bubbles in the surrounding dusty mist, returning heavy
elements to the mix, where collapsing clouds would harvest such chemical
riches to make the next generation of stars.
Watching these matchheads flare amid sheets of luminous gas, he said, "Until
now, doing cosmology was like taking a picture halfway through a fistfight and
figuring out who must've started it."
"And why," Alicia said.
Far above the teeming throng of stars and burning nebulae, she and Zak could
witness the stabbing lances of jets that poked up and out from the galactic
nucleus. These apparently came from a black hole abuilding at the very center
of the entire bee-swarm rotation.
They saw violet beams jut into the spaces between galaxies and carve paths for
later ruby flows of hot plasma.
Her grandmother had always termed God Providence. There was even a Baptist
hymn about that, which she had learned one summer when forced to go to Sunday
school. Now Alicia wondered about an entity that spattered the night sky with
endless stars, gaudy gaseous nebulae, whole long chains and superclusters of
pale galaxies, all silent and glowing without apparent purpose, and thought a
better name was Improvidence: extravagant impulse lavishing its abundance in
wasteful display.
Alicia:
You're impossible to reach by phone, and I can figure why, but I
have to warn you about the attitude of people here. We're seeing
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GREGORY BENFORD ·
plenty of development in what we can see in our Cosm. I'll try to compile it
and get you a summary, but what the director is insisting on here is *your*
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data. We need it to guide us.
Dave
Dave:
I've just been too busy to organize our work. Your Cosm is still
exponentiating in time, right? Our rate is still slower than yours, but we're
further along in the exponential. If our numbers and yours are still right,
you should overtake us in a few weeks. But by then ours will be really old.
As ours speeds up more and more, our data flow rate is taking off, nearly
beyond our capabilities, gigabytes per minute. I'll try to get some to you
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