“You’re missing my point,” Uvarov said silkily. “Mark, democracy as a method of human interaction is already millennia old. And we know how easy it is to subvert any democratic process. There are endless examples of people using a democratic system as a games-theory framework of rules to achieve their own ends.

“Use your imagination. Is there truly nothing better? Have we learned nothing about ourselves in all that time?”

“Democracies don’t go to war with each other, Uvarov,” Mark said coldly. “Democracies — however imperfectly — reflect the will of the many, not the few. Or the one.

“As you’ve told me, Uvarov, we remain primitives. Maybe we’re still too primitive to trust ourselves not to operate without a democratic framework.”

Uvarov bowed his elegant, silvered head — but without conviction or agreement, as if merely conceding a debating point.

The four scooters rose smoothly past the half-finished Decks.

She was suspended in a bath of charged particles. It was isotropic, opaque, featureless…

She had entered a new realm of matter.

Lieserl. Lieserl! I know you can hear me; I’m monitoring the feedback loops, just listen to me. Your senses are overloaded; they are going to take time to adapt to this environment. That’s why you’re whited out. You’re not designed for this, damn it. But your processors will soon be able to interpret the neutrino flux, the temperature and density gradients, even some of the g-mode patterns, and construct a sensorium for you. You’ll be able to see again, Lieserl; just wait for the processors to cut in…

The voice continued, buzzing in her ear like some insect. It seemed irrelevant, remote. In this mush of plasma, she couldn’t even see her own body. She was suspended in isotropy and homogeneity — the same everywhere, and in every direction. It was as if this plasma sea, this radiative zone, were some immense sensory-deprivation bath arranged for her benefit.

But she wasn’t afraid. Her fear was gone now, washed away in the pearl-like light. The silence…

Damn it, Lieserl, I’m not going to lose you now! Listen to my voice. You’ve gone in there to find dark matter, not to lose your soul.

Lieserl, lost in whiteness, allowed the still, small voice to whisper into her head.

She dreamed of photinos.

Dark matter was the best candidate for aging the Sun.

Dark matter comprised all but one hundredth of the mass of the Universe; the visible matter — baryonic matter which made up stars, galaxies, people — was a frosting, a thin scattering across a dark sea.

The effects of dark matter had been obvious long before a single particle of the stuff had been detected by human physicists. The Milky Way galaxy itself was embedded in a flattened disc of dark matter, a hundred times the mass of its visible components. The stars of the Milky Way didn’t orbit its core, as they would in the absence of the dark matter; instead the galaxy turned as if it were a solid disc — the illuminated disc was like an immense toy, embedded in dark glass.

According to the Standard Model there was a knot of cold, dark matter at the heart of the Sun — perhaps at the heart of every star.

And so, Lieserl dreamed, perhaps it was dark matter, passing through fusing hydrogen like a dream of winter, which was causing the Sun to die.

Now, slowly, the isotropy bleached out of the world. There was a hint of color a pinkness, a greater warmth, its source lost in the clouds below her. At first she thought this must be some artifact of her own consciousness — an illusion concocted by her starved senses. The shading was smooth, without feature save for its gradual deepening, from the zenith of her sky to its deepest red at the nadir beneath her feet. But it remained in place around her, objectively real, even as she moved her head. It was out there, and it was sufficient to restore structure to the world — to give her a definite up and down.

She found herself sighing. She almost regretted the return of the external world; she could very quickly have grown accustomed to floating in nothingness.

Lieserl. Can you see that? What do you see?

“I see elephants playing basketball.”

Lieserl —

“I’m seeing the temperature gradient, aren’t I?”

Yes. It’s nice to have you back, girl.

The soft, cozy glow was the light of the fusion hell of the core, filtered through her babyish Virtual senses.

There was light here, she knew — or at least, there were photons: packets of X-ray energy working their way out from the core of the Sun, where they were created in billions of fusion flashes. If Lieserl could have followed the path of a single photon, she would see it move in a random, zigzag way, bouncing off charged particles as if in some subatomic game. The steps in the random walk traversed at the speed of light — were, on average, less than an inch long.

The temperature gradient in this part of the Sun was tiny. But it was real, and it was just sufficient to encourage a few of the zigzagging photons to work their way outwards to the surface, rather than inwards. But the paths were long — the average photon needed a thousand billion billion steps to reach the outer boundary of the radiative layer. The journey took ten million years — and because the photons moved at the speed of light, the paths themselves were ten million light-years long, wrapped over on themselves like immense lengths of crumpled ribbon.

Now, as other “senses” cut in, she started to make out more of the environment around her. Pressure and density gradients showed up in shades of blue and green, deepening in intensity toward the center, closely matching the temperature differentials. It was as if she were suspended inside some huge, three-dimensional diagram of the Sun’s equation of state.

As if on cue, the predictions of the Standard Model of theoretical physics cut in, overlaying the pressure, temperature and density gradients like a mesh around her face. The divergences from the Standard Model were highlighted in glowing strands of wire.

There were still divergences from the Model, she saw. There were divergences everywhere. And they were even wider than before.

Dark matter and baryonic matter attracted each other gravitationally. Dark matter particles could interact with baryonic matter through other forces: but only feebly, and in conditions of the highest density — such as at the heart of stars. In Earthlike conditions, the worlds of baryonic and dark matter slid through and past each other, all but unaware, like colonies of ghosts from different millennia.

This made dark matter hard to study. But after centuries of research, humans had succeeded in trapping a few of the elusive particles.

Dark matter was made up of sparticles — ghostly mirror-images of the everyday particles of baryonic matter.

Images in what mirror? Lieserl wondered feebly. As she framed the question the answer assembled itself for her, but — drifting as she was — it was hard to tell if it came from the voice of Kevan Scholes, or from the forced-learning she’d endured as a child, or from the data stores contained within her wormhole.

Hard to tell, and harder to care.

The particle mirror was supersymmetry, the grand theory which had at last shown how the diverse forces of physics — gravitational, electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear — were all aspects of a single, unified superforce. The superforce emerged at extremes of temperature and pressure, shimmering like a blade of some tempered metal in the hearts of supernovas, or during the first instants of the Big Bang itself. Away from these extremes of time and space, the superforce collapsed into its components, and the supersymmetry was broken.