This gave her a kind of status. Not many true Originals walked the Earth, though the historians who pestered her early education said there had once been billions of them afoot. Billions! There were hardly a tenth that many now in all Earthly humanitarian's. Not that she cared much about such numbers. Mathematics was a fossil art. Few in her time bothered to scale those heights of analysis with their majestic, abstruse peaks that the ancient civilizations had climbed, marked as their own, and finally abandoned as too chilly, remote, and even inhuman.

Cley frowned. "What's beyond the stars?

Spaces, geometries -- beyond infinity, in a way.

Cley sent, Beyond our universe?

Other dimensions, other....surfaces, in those dimensions. Membranes. It is difficult to explain without training in the topologies of space-time.

[Seeker:] "I suspect it will be a morph form that manifests in this geometry as more cylindrical, to match the boundary conditions."

Cley blinked. "You we're once a mathist, weren't you?"

"All procyons [i.e. genetically engineered raccoons] are, as children."

"I didn't learn words like `symmetry principle.' mathists do."

All this seemed like abstract fictions to Cley, even when Seeker had explained that the idea had led to mathematics that nicely packaged up the fundamental forces, starting with gravity. In theory, the forces then all merged "naturally" -- for the mathematically minded. To Cley, this had verged on the theological... ...But even those ancient mathists had not envisioned a place like this Tubeworld, a dimension simultaneously near infinite along it cylindrical length, but small enough across to walk around in an hour.

Seeker said, "The Ur-humans found all such laws -- the work was that elementary. But, to know how gravity pulls upon a body does not mean even in principle that you can force how many such bodies will move."

On average, empty space has zero energy. But by enclosing a volume with a sphere of conducting g plasma, the Malign prevented the creation of waves with wavelengths larger than that volume. These missing waves gave the vacuum a net negative energy and allowed formation of a wormhole in space-time. All such processes are ruled by probabilities requiring great calculation. Yet through that hole the Maling slithered.