But there were anomalies. He found many supernova sites, swelling giants, wizened dwarfs: the stars were aged, more aged than he had expected. Clearly many millions of years had passed since his time on the Sugar Lump — enough time for the Xeelee to have completed their galactic engineering — yet this immense duration was insignificant on the cosmic scale.

So why did the stars seem so old? He found no answer.

Driven by curiosity he began to experiment with his awareness. Physically he was composed of a tight knot of quantum wave functions; now, cautiously, he began to unravel that knot, to allow the focus of his consciousness to slide over space-time. Soon it was as if he was flying over the arch of the cosmos, unbound by limits of space or time.

He descended through the plane of the Galaxy, his sense-analogues spread wide.

Much of the Milky Way, he found, had been rebuilt. Huge constructs, some light years across, had been assembled: there were rings, sheets, ribbons of stars, stars surrounded by vast artifacts — rings, spheres, polyhedra. In these celestial cities the component stars appeared to have been selected — or, perhaps, built — with great discrimination. Here, for example, was a ring of a dozen Sol-like yellow dwarfs surrounding a brooding red giant; the dwarfs circled their parent so closely that Paul could see how they dipped into the turbulent outer layers of the giant’s red flesh. The dwarfs in that necklet must once have been utterly identical, but now time had taken its toll: one of the dwarfs even appeared to have suffered a minor nova explosion — the shrunken remnant was surrounded by a shell of expanding, cooling debris — and the rest were fading to dimness, their hydrogen fuel depleted and vast spots disfiguring their shining surfaces.

Throughout the Galaxy Paul found evidence of such decay.

He was saddened by what he saw… and puzzled. He had noted this star aging before; and the time scales still did not make sense.

Something, some agency, had aged the stars.

Paul soared beneath the plane of the Galaxy. The great disc was a ceiling of curdled gold above him. The spiral arms were devastated: made ragged, the spirals disrupted by the blisters of yellow-red light which swelled across the lanes of dust.

Those blisters were supernova remnants. Enduring forced aging, a lot of the more spectacular, and beautiful, spiral arm stars would simply explode, tearing themselves apart… probably there had been chain reactions of supernovae, with the wreckage of one star destabilizing another.

Paul stared up at the wreckage of the disc, the muddled spiral arms.

Some things remained the same, though. Paul saw how the great star system rotated as one, as if solid. The Galaxy’s visible matter was no more than a fraction of its total bulk; a vast, invisible halo of dark matter swathed the bright spiral, so that the light matter lay at the bottom of a deep gravity pit, turning like an oil drop in a puddle.

Now Paul climbed out of that huge, deep gravity well and passed through the halo of dark matter. The ghostly stuff barely impinged on his awareness. Photinos — the dark matter particles — interacted with normal matter only through the gravitational force, so that even to Paul the halo was like the faintest mist.

But he perceived odd hints of structure, too elusive to identify.

Were there worlds here, he wondered, cold stars, perhaps even beings with their own goals and ambitions?

Paul turned away from the Galaxy and faced the hostile Universe.

The quantum functions connecting him to the site of man’s original system stretched thin. Soon the human Galaxy shrank to a mote in the vast cathedral of space. He saw clusters and super clusters of galaxies, glowing softly, sprinkled over space in great filaments and sheets, so that it was as if the Universe were built of spiderweb.

On the largest of scales space was a froth of baryonic matter, a chaotic structure of threads and sheets of shining starstuff, separated by voids a hundred million light years across.

And everywhere, on both the small scale and the large, Paul found evidence of the work of intelligence, and in particular of the vast, unrestrained projects of the Xeelee. They had turned galaxies into neat balls of stars, and in one place they had caused two galaxy clusters — whole clusters! — to collide, in order to create a region a million light years wide in which matter was nowhere less dense than in the outer layers of a red giant star.

Paul wondered what manner of creatures moved through that vast sea…

And everywhere he traveled Paul found the premature aging of stars.

Paul’s anger stirred, illogically.

Cautiously, clinging to his wave-function ropes, Paul sank into the dark matter ocean.

Currents of photinos swept past him. The moving masses distorted space-time, and the density was high enough for him to perceive vast structures gliding through his focus of awareness. Gradually he came to understand the structure of his Universe.

Dark matter comprised most of the mass of the Universe. Baryons — protons and neutrons, the components of light, visible matter — and photinos — their dark matter analogues — existed largely independently of each other, interacting only through gravitational attraction.

All matter, dark and light, had erupted from the singularity at the start of time which had forced space itself to unfurl like a torn sheet. The dark matter had spread like some viscous liquid into every corner of the young Universe and, seething, settled into a kind of equilibrium. The baryons had been sprinkled like a froth over this sea.

At first the dark ocean was featureless, save only for variations in its smooth density. These glitches, representing mass concentrations on the order of millions of solar masses, formed gravitational wells, cosmic potholes into which fragments of light matter fell, pooled, and began to coalesce. Gravitational warming began, and — finally, fitfully — the first stars sputtered to brightness. A billion years after the singularity the galaxies formed, trapped like flies in the dark matter wrinkles.

Slowly dark currents pushed the galaxies together, and large-scale structures — the vast, gaudy superstructure that would span the Universe — began to evolve.

Most of this made no difference to the dark matter sea… but, here and there, the material of the shining stars began to exert an influence on its dark counterpart. Just as baryons had slithered into dark matter potholes, so — on a much smaller scale — photinos collected in the pinpoint gravity wells of the new stars.

Even the human star, Sol, had contained a dark core the size of a moon. Human scientists had observed this dark parasite indirectly by its effect on the neutrino output of the Sun…

And, in a slow explosion of insight, Paul began to see a connection between the dark matter canker at the hearts of the stars, and the aging of the baryonic Universe.

Excited, he skimmed through the Universe, studying the cooling corpses of extinguished stars.

And at last, datum by datum, he came to understand the secret history of the Universe.

Thanks to the baryonic stars small-scale structure entered the dark matter Universe. Paul speculated that a chemistry must have begun, with varieties of the photinos combining to form some counterpart of molecules; strange rains had sleeted over the surfaces of the shadow worlds, still buried in the blazing cores of baryon stars.

At last life had arisen.

Paul had no way of knowing if the transition to life had occurred on one of the shadow planets or on several, perhaps in a variety of forms. Nor could he guess what form that life had taken, what technologies and philosophies it had evolved.