Schild's ladder / Egan, Greg

The accidental creation of an enormous, rapidly expanding vacuum in space has the now-immortal human population jumping from solar system to solar system in an attempt to avoid being devoured, and sets competing teams of scientists battling to each other over whether to destroy the vacuum, or leave it alone to study.

Twenty-thousand years in the future, humans confront a rapidly expanding vacuum that devours everything in its path. Tchicaya works with the Yielders to study the vacuum and allow it to grow. He is conflicted when his first love, Mariama, enters his life on behalf of the Preservationists, who want to destroy the vacuum. What none of the futurists know is that life is developing in the center of the vacuum.