Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

air,
its precious water were scattered in ships across the Galaxy. Its
metals were sucked from its deep interior. Its inner heat was tapped
for energy.’
    That was why the magnetic field had collapsed: as the planet’s
heat had been drained its liquid core crystallised, and Earth’s
magnetism failed. The internal cooling had also weakened the great
mantle currents. So there were no more volcanoes or earthquakes, and
the mountains currently eroding away were the last the old world
would ever see.
    Luru whispered, ’In the final madness of their wars the engineers
tapped into the planet’s ultimate energy store, its gravity well.
They sucked out mass-energy - they reduced the effective mass of the
planet. That is why you feel so light on your feet, Symat; that is
why we are able to put up buildings so delicate they would seem more
suited to a dwarf world like Mars. Earth is the little world that
fought a Galactic war! But in the end it could give us no more.’
    ’Which is why,’ the Curator prompted, ’you believe we must save it
now.’
    ’Yes. And I haven’t spent half a million years striving to save
the Earth from the swelling sun to see it put to the Xeelee flame
now. I have a plan,’ Luru said. ’Come. The dawn is rising. Walk with
me into the light, and we’ll talk.’
     
    It all depended on the Guardians, and their Snowflake
cosmic-linkage technology. Luru said, ’With such a technology you can
do almost anything you can conceive of. Why, you can bend spacetime
itself…’
    And that was what Luru intended to do.
    If you descended into a gravity well, you found your clocks
turning more slowly than those of your colleagues on an orbiting
ship, far above. All this was commonplace. Even in a gravity well as
shallow as Earth’s, time passed more slowly for Symat than for an
observer up there in free space. In a black hole, the deepest gravity
well possible, the time-stretching effect ultimately became dominant,
until at the event horizon itself time would cease to flow for you
altogether.
    The Curator shook his head. ’Ascendent, I’m no physicist. Are you
planning to turn the Earth into a black hole?’
    ’No. But I want to reshape its spacetime.’
    Luru planned to make the Earth a pit of slow time. Just as if
looking into a black hole, from the outside time on its surface would
seem stretched out. Conversely if you stood on its surface, you would
see blueshifted stars wheel across the sky, flaring and dying. It was
possible to do all this, she claimed, by manipulating spacetime
subtly; you didn’t need the immense and concentrated mass of a black
hole to do it.
    Mela was looking oddly absent; Symat imagined massed intelligences
looking through her eyes and listening through her ears, and crowding
her mind with their speculations. She said, ’It would have to be
quite a gradient. There would be a perceptible difference in the
passage of time over the height of a human - a difference between
your head and your toes!’
    Symat scratched his head. ’That would be a strange place to
live.’
    ’People adapt. And with their lives stretched out to megayears, ’
Luru said, ’the inhabitants of Earth would be safe from the
depredations of the Xeelee, or anybody else. They wouldn’t even need
energy from outside, for Earth’s inner heat, reduced to a trickle,
would fuel their slow-moving biosphere. Of course there are a few
details to work out. This must be a long-term solution. The saved
Earth - or >Old Earth< as I think of it - will need a stocked
ecology, a self-renewing biosphere, some equivalent of tectonic
processing. It will need a day and a night. I haven’t worked out how
yet.’
    The Curator laughed. ’A typical Ascendent solution - to save the
world with a gift of time!’
    ’But,’ Symat asked anxiously, ’will it work?’
    ’Oh, yes,’ Luru said calmly. ’The Guardians can do this. I’ve been
able to consult them about it. They can turn their weapons on the
Earth itself, and use the resources of a universe to reshape it as
they please.’
    The Curator shook his head. ’If this Snowflake weapon is capable
of such a remarkable feat, why not turn it on the Xeelee? We could
scatter their fleets of nightfighters like swatting flies.’
    ’We? ’ Luru mocked him. ’For a shell of a programme with no
personality, you have stored up a lot of aggression, Curator.’
    He scowled at her taunting, and Symat could see centuries of
bitterness in his expression. ’Why not just