The Darkest Side of Saturn

Prologue

In the beginning, in our cradle of creation, the world was without form. Nothing existed except the potential to exist. There was no matter. There was no space for matter to occupy. This state existed for an immeasurable time because there was not even a place for time in the nursery of future universes.

Suddenly there was a quantum vacuum fluctuation -- never mind that a vacuum implies there’s nothing to fluctuate. In the first infinitesimal interval was born time, space, and matter. We embarked on the first task of our new baby universe, which was to begin a long cruise of expansion to push back the frontier of nothingness.

Commensurate with the Many-worlds interpretation of the quantum mechanical theory that was to become fashionable many eons hence, our baby universe immediately began dividing into infinitely many sister universes, invisible to each other but nevertheless real and weaving almost parallel but slightly diverging courses through meta-time. One of these -- minutely altered from ours -- was to become the home of the Author. In that universe, as in ours, there was vast light, whiter than white. Matter followed space followed matter, inextricably linked. A chaotic soup of naked particles and the coordinate manifold in which it boiled expanded pell-mell into the future.

Never mind the Author’s universe! In ours -- nearly four hundred thousand years later -- the fireball of expansion cooled and faded as electrons, protons, and neutrons ended long courtship rituals and settled into blissful married life as nuclear families of simple atoms of hydrogen, helium, and a tiny smattering of heavier elements. The fireball ended, the universe became lucid, and the leftover background radiation -- radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, x- and gamma-ray -- began a long unimpeded stretch into the wavelengths we would eventually hear as interstellar fuzz in our microwave receivers. A hundred million years later the first stars condensed from collapsing clouds of hydrogen, and after that, galaxies were born, seeded with black holes and condensing themselves into swirls of stars.

In one of these galaxies -- nine billion years after the beginning -- an unremarkable cloud of gas and dust enriched with heavier elements recycled from the supernova ghosts of ancestor stars began the slow contraction that ended in the formation of a new yellow star. The leftover dust and gas formed a great disk about this star, then condensed into numerous large and small bodies. Collisions ensued, large against large, small against small, and all gradations between, and in the interval of only a few tens of millions of years most of the matter in this stellar system had consolidated itself into a few large behemoths called planets.

Most of the remaining dust and gas of the system vanished, disbursed into interstellar space, blown away by the radiative push of the new star. Most of the smallest bodies in the interstices of the system also vanished, eaten by their planetary cousins.

But remnants of these small bodies -- these leftover crumbs of creation and collision -- continued to wander throughout the system. One of these, B, of modest size and carbonaceous composition, circulated initially in a simple orbit in the outer part of a great grinding field of small bodies between the fourth and fifth planets. After a few hundred million years, bobbing like a cork in gravitational tides and surfs, dinged and dented by encounters with its neighbors, B passed close to the fifth planet, and its orbit altered to include approaches to the fourth. In the course of the next few billion years it suffered more tiny gravitational encounters with both the fifth and fourth planets until eventually a somewhat larger nudge brought B into the range of the third, our cradle endlessly orbiting.

Meanwhile, our organization had begun on this planet. Meanwhile, we had become conscious, which is to say we had discovered ourselves and the universe about us. But we had not yet seen this modest particle.

Curiously this mote, B, did not exist in our Author’s universe -- which in many other aspects remained identical to ours. In our universe, however, B was real. In our universe, finally, at this third planet -- after one thousand nine hundred and ninety-seven revolutions about the central star since the arbitrarily defined birth of a significant religious figure -- B arrived within the perceptive purview of the planet’s inhabitants.