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The orderly spacetime with which humans were familiar was suffused with vacuum energy, out of which virtual particles, electrons and quarks, would fizz into existence, and then scatter or annihilate, their brief walks upon the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this extraordinary place whole universes bubbled out of the froth, to expand and dissipate, or to collapse in a despairing flare.

This chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of nonbeing where whole universes clustered in reefs of foamy spindrift, was suffused by a light beyond light. But even in this cauldron of strangeness there was life. Even here there was mind.

Call them monads.

-Exultant, Ch. 35

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Enduring Hope thought he understood. 'And if we attack the black hole,' he said doggedly, 'we could destroy the monads. Is that what you fear?'

'Yes,' Nilis said gratefully, sweat beading his brow. 'Oh, my boy—yes! That is precisely what I fear.'

Kimmer said, 'But even if you are right, there are other galaxies. Other nests of monads.'

Nilis insisted, 'We can't make any simple assumptions about this situation, Marshal.' He spoke rapidly about levels of reality, of interconnectivity in higher dimensions. 'By striking a blow in this one place we may wreak damage everywhere, and for all time....'

Luru Parz said slowly, 'The Commissary fears that if we destroy the monads we will break the thread—don't you, Nilis?—the shining thread of life, of creativity, that connects this universe to those that preceded it, and to those that will follow. To kill them would be patricide—or deicide, perhaps.' She smiled. 'Ah, but I forgot. In this enlightened age you don't have gods—or fathers, do you? It's entirely appropria

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People had forgotten how to fight. They fled to the home Galaxy, and then fell back further to the spiral arms. But even there the scattered stars faded one by one.

It took the Xeelee three hundred thousand years, but at last, a million years after the first starships, the streams of refugees became visible in the skies of Earth.

-Resplendent, "Between Worlds"

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At first there was a period of stasis – the Long Calm, the historians called it. It lasted two hundred thousand years. The stasis was only comparative; human history resumed, with all its usual multiple-wavelength turbulence.

-Resplendent, "Between Worlds"

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When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Hama Druz, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, we decided enough was enough. We had always worked covertly, tweaking history here and there – as I had meddled in the destiny of the Exultants. Now it was different. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, we emerged from the shadows, and began to act.

We established a new centralising government called the Commonwealth. Slowly – so slowly most mayflies lived and died without ever seeing what we were doing – we strove to challenge time, to dam the flow of history. To gain control, at last.

And we attempted a deeper unity, a linking of minds called the Transcendence. This superhuman entity would envelop all of mankind in its joyous unity, reaching even deep into the past to redeem the benighted lives that had gone before. But the gulf between man and god proved too wide to bridge.

Half a million years after mankind first left Earth, the Transcendence proved the high water mark o

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And yet the Unifier planted the seeds of a deeper unity. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that their ancestors had shared the same warm pond. After ten thousand more years that unity found a common cause.

Mankind’s hard-won Galaxy was a mere tidal pool of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new sub-species were even bred specifically to serve as weapons.

This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years. In the end, like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena – and by time, which erodes all human purposes.

-Resplendent, "Between Worlds"

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The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.

Sixty-five thousand years after the conquest of the Galaxy, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier used one human type as a weapon against another, before one of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent as all those before.

-Resplendent, "Between Worlds"

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And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted.

This was the Bifurcation of Mankind. How it would have horrified that dry old stick Hama Druz! There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other, and a fundamental xenophobia fuelled genocides.

-Resplendent, "Between Worlds"

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Cautiously Asher identified features. Such as a long, streaky wound, evidently the relic of a recent explosion. ‘Most of the accretion disc is star stuff. Every ten thousand years or so a star wanders in too close to the black hole. The tides get hold of it, and it is stretched out, turned into a tube of hydrogen – still fusing; the magnetic and gravitational fields close to the hole keep hold of it that tightly. But when it passes closest approach, those fields weaken, and the star explodes, with the savagery of a hundred supernovas. But even that is just a detail, this close to Chandra.’

As Jophiel looked further inwards, to the inner rim of the accretion disc, he saw that it glowed, hot and violent. There, infalling material was heated to billions of degrees. Most of it was hurled back into the wider disc – but a fraction fell into the hole, to be lost to the universe for ever.

Xeelee: Redemption, Ch. 39

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So, Pirius thought, studying his display, to get at the black hole his greenships were going to have to fly through a hail of Xeelee flak, as well as pushing through the hazardous zone of the accretion disc.

-Exultant, Ch. 56