He looked at Nita. "Do you know anything about 'dark matter'?" "Mostly that it was missing," Nita said. "Astronomers have been looking for it for a long time, maybe a hundred years or so. But now they've started to find it." "And so have scientists on a lot of other worlds," Carl said. "Know what's strange about that?" "That it took us so long?" Kit said. Carl shook his head. "That all the sentient species who were looking for dark matter started finding it at around the same time." Nita sat there and wondered what to make of that. "The discovery of dark matter and the increase in the speed of the universe's expansion are somehow connected," Tom said. "Dark matter is being detected in ever-increasing masses and volumes… as if it was appearing out of nowhere. And in all the places where 'new' dark matter is being found, local space is starting to expand much faster than it should. Thousands of times faster." "So everything's getting farther and farther away from everything else," Kit said. "Right. Now, that's bad enough by itself. But there are also side effects to this kind of abnormal expansion. Mental ones… and effects that go deeper than the merely mental." Roshaun stirred uncomfortably, and a sort of rustle went through Filif's branches. "The expansion isn't just affecting space itself," Carl said. "It also stretches thin the structure space is hung on-the subdimensions, the realms of hyperstrings and so on. If the expansion isn't slowed to its normal rate, physical laws are going to start misbehaving. And since those laws are the basis on which life and thought work, people here and everywhere else are going to start being affected personally by the greatly increased expansion." "How?" Filif said. "That's going to vary from species to species," Tom said. "In our case, the case of Senior Wizards-and I don't mean Seniors, but everyone much past latency, what our own species calls adolescence-it's going to look like a slowly increasing physical and then mental weariness.