The New Space Opera 2 Read Online Free PDF

chose to go Longer.
    Just like last time, Erasmus warned me that it might be a suicidal act. If the Fleet was lost, we would be lost along with it…our subjective lives could end within days or hours. If, on the other hand, the Fleet survived and got back to reproducing itself, well, we might live on indefinitely—even drop back into realtime if we chose to do so. “Can you accept the risk?” he asked.
    â€œCan you ?”
    He had grown a face by then. I suppose he knew me well enough to calculate what features I’d find pleasing. But it wasn’t his ridiculous fake humanity I loved. What I loved was what went on behind those still-gemlike, tourmaline eyes—the person he had become by sharing my mortality. “I accepted that risk a long time ago,” he said.
    â€œYou and me both, Erasmus.”
    So we held on to each other and just— went fast .
    Hard to explain what made that time-dive so vertiginous, but imagine centuries flying past like so much dust in a windstorm! It messed up our sense of place , first of all. Used to be we had a point of view light-years wide and deep…now all those loops merged into one continuous cycle; we grew as large as the Milky Way itself, with Andromeda bearing down on us like a silver armada. I held Erasmus in my arms, watching wide-eyed while he updated himself on the progress of the war and whispered new discoveries into my ear.
    The Fleet had worked up new defenses, he said, and the carnage had slowed; but our numbers were still dwindling.
    I asked him if we were dying.
    He said he didn’t know. Then he looked alarmed and held me tighter. “Oh, Carlotta…”
    â€œWhat?” I stared into his eyes, which had gone faraway and strange. “ What is it ? Erasmus, tell me!”
    â€œThe Enemy,” he said in numbed amazement.
    â€œWhat about them?”
    â€œI know what they are.”
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    The bedroom door opens.
    The elder Carlotta doesn’t remember the bedroom door opening. None of this is as she remembers it should be. The young Carlotta cringes against the backboard of the bed, so terrified she can barely draw breath. Bless you, girl, I’d hold your hand if I could!
    What comes through the door is just Abby Boudaine. Abby in a cheap white nightgown. But Abby’s eyes are yellow-rimmed and feral, and her nightgown is spattered with blood.
    Â 
    See, the thing is this. All communication is limited by the speed of light. But if you spread your saccades over time, that speed limit kind of expands. Slow as we were, light seemed to cross galactic space in a matter of moments. Single thoughts consumed centuries. We felt the super-massive black hole at the center of the galaxy beating like a ponderous heart. We heard whispers from nearby galaxies, incomprehensibly faint but undeniably manufactured. Yes, girl, we were that slow.
    But the Enemy was even slower.
    â€œLong ago,” Erasmus told me, channeling this information from the Fleet’s own dying collectivity, “long ago, the Enemy learned to parasitize dark matter…to use it as a computational substrate…to evolve within it…”
    â€œ How long ago?”
    His voice was full of awe. “Longer than you have words for, Carlotta. They’re older than the universe itself.”
    Make any sense to you? I doubt it would. But here’s the thing about our universe: it oscillates. It breathes , I mean, like a big old lung, expanding and shrinking and expanding again. When it shrinks, it wants to turn into a singularity, but it can’t do that, because there’s a limit to how much mass a quantum of volume can hold without busting. So it all bangs up again, until it can’t accommodate any more emptiness. Back and forth, over and over. Perhaps ad infinitum.
    Trouble is, no information can get past those hot chaotic contractions. Every bang makes a fresh universe, blank as a chalkboard in an empty schoolhouse…
    Or so we