I know stuff the others don't. Slow exhalation. Use it. "Inspiring, isn't it?" He meant Avernon's theory. "Broad as well as deep."

Striding carefully across the polished floor, he gestured one holodisplay after another into existence.

"So revolutionary, no-one's had time to work through the implications." Animated now, he was surrounded by wafting translucent phase space manifolds: gossamer sheets manifested in light.

"If you think of it" -- causing a burst of new volumes: blue, silver, and a hundred pastel shades -- "it resolves the ancient negentropy question once and for all."

Stillness in the chamber.

Tom drew Avernon-style metavectors into position. The Lords, eyes flickering, descended into deep logosophical trance.

...

His key display was a simple 3D static image: glistening, roughtly spheroidal, denoting a flat (2D) universe. It started as a point, grew larger to a maximum diameter, then shrank again to another point. The unvierse as a giant pearl; time as a horizontal axis.

Base everything around that.

...

There were, in effect, two big bangs. Two cosmic histories colliding in the middle, where time switched over from one direction to the other. The concept was called Gold-Sakharov negentropy, and it was so old that Tom was not sure of its origins.

Pause now.

Tom allowed the Lords to meditate on his display.

"Previous arguments," he continued after a few minutes, "have relied on symmetry. Avernon's -- excuse me, Lord Avernon's -- metavector actually requires it" -- he pointed to a twisting manifold -- "for consistency."

Beyond the simple pearl image, more sophistacted imagery showed the cosmos as a hypersphere (subtly different-hued, distorted spheroieds nestling along a notional time-axis) and as a moving construct in 12-space.

"It would be interesting to see how that would map to mu-space--"

Destiny! The lords, stony-faced in logotropic trance, said nothing. What have I revealed?

"-- which I know nothing of, except that its mythical dimensions were supposed to be fractal. As a though experiment, consider the possibility of an infinitely recursive, self-referencing statement, attempting to compete itself."

I'm doing it.

Excited now, almost forgetting the committee, Tom waved golden seas and spongiform black stars into being.

"The number of depths and number of instances are both infinite. But is one infinity a bigger class of infinity than the other?"

He waited a moment, then plunged on.

"By applying the metavector" -- almost dancing, he manoeuvered through his images -- "we see that it negates Gödel's theorem as a direct analogue of negating unidirectional entropic time in realspace."

No questions.

There could not be, for the Lords were too deep in trance to verbalize and Tom had full control of the holos.

"-- Which brings us back to the symmetry arguments. Our realspace cosmos begins from a tiny locus, expands with time until a maximum is reached, then contracts once more to a near-point."

Pearl. Simple image.

"The universe essentially has two origins in time, which grow forwards to meet each other. Two big bangs. We can't know which half of the cosmic life cycle we're in."

...

"Now the Avernon metavector" -- Tom hid a smile, wondering if he had just coined a name for posterity -- "requires the symmetry. But symmetry cannot be broken at the end points, at the big bang or crunch, any more than at the midpoint. So, in fact, the universal history must look like this."

The universe was no longer a single pearl.

It was a long string of pearls, one after the other.

...

It was the true cosmic cycle, revealed for the first time.