is at equilibrium. At equilibrium no energy can flow, and therefore it cannot be used for work, any more than the level waters of a pond can be used to drive a water-wheel. It is on the flow of energy out of equilibriumthe small fraction of useful energy, exergythat life depends.
And everywhere, exergy was being wasted.
Everywhere, evolution drove the progression of life to ever more complex forms, which depended on an ever faster usage of the available energy flow. And then there was intelligence. Civilizations were like experiments in ways of using up exergy faster.
From the Firstborns lofty point of view, the Martians speculated, the products of petty civilizations like their own were irrelevant. All that mattered was the flow of exergy, and the rate at which it was used up.
Surely a civilization so old as the Firstborn, so arbitrarily advanced, would become concerned with the destiny of the cosmos as a whole, and of the usage of its finite resources. The longer you wanted your culture to last, the more carefully you had to husband those resources.
If you wanted to reach the very far futurethe Last Days, when the surge of quintessence finally ended the age of matterthe restrictions were harsh. The Martians own calculations indicated that the universe could bear only one world as populous and energy-hungry as their own, one world in each of the universes hundred billion empty galaxies, if the Last Days were to be reached.
The Firstborn must have seen that if life were to survive in the very long termif even a single thread of awareness was to be passed to the furthest futurediscipline was needed on a cosmic scale. There must be no unnecessary disturbance, no wasted energy, no ripples in the stream of time.
Life: there was nothing more precious to the Firstborn. But it had to be the right kind of life. Orderly, calm, disciplined. Sadly, that was rare.
Certainly they regretted what they did. They watched the destruction they wreaked, and constructed time-sliced samples of the worlds they ruined, and popped them in pocket universes. But the Martian knew that in this toy universe the positive of its mass-energy was balanced out by the negative of gravity. And when it died, as soon it must, the energy sums would cancel out, a whole cosmos lapsing to the abstraction of zero.
The Firstborn were economical even in their expressions of regret.
The Martians argued among themselves as to why the Firstborn were so intent on reaching the Last Days.
Perhaps it derived from their origin. Perhaps in their coming of awareness in the First Days they had encounteredanother. One as far beyond their cosmos as they were beyond the toy universes in which they stored their time-slice worlds. One who would return in the Last Days, to consider what should be saved.
The Firstborn probably believed that in their universal cauterization they were being benevolent.
The last Martian pondered the signal from Mir.
Those on Mir had no wish to submit to the Firstborns hammer blow. Nor had the Martians wanted to see their culture die for the sake of a neurosis born when the cosmos was young. So they fought back. Just as the creatures from Mir, and its mother world in the parent universe, were trying to fight back now.
Her choice was clear.
It took her seven Martian days to make the preparations.
While she worked she considered her own future. She knew that this pocket cosmos was dying. She had no desire to die with it. And she knew that her own only possible exit was via another Firstborn artifact, clearly visible in her enhanced senses, an artifact nestling on the third planet.
All that for the future.
Unfortunately the implosion of the spacetime cage would damage her spire of ice. She began the construction of a new one, some distance away. The work pleased her.
The new spire was no more than half-finished when, following the modifications she had made, the gravitational cage crushed the Firstborn Eye.
PART 4 DECISIONS 51: DECISION
There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into spacetime. And it had many functions.
One of those was to serve as a conduit of information.
When the Martian trap closed, the Eye there emitted a signal of distress. A shriek, transmitted to all its sister projections.
The Q-bomb was the only Firstborn artifact in the solar system, save for the Eye trapped in its Pit on Mars. And the Q-bomb sensed that shriek, a signal it could neither believe nor understand.
Troubled, it looked ahead.
There before the Q-bomb, a glittering toy,