Galactic Center - Furious Gulf Part 10

The aperture moment.

9.

The Cyaneans Toby put his arm around Besen and held on for dear life. The Argo groaned and pulsed. Decks and bulkheads creaked. Toby felt his own boots rock with unseen stress. His Isaac Aspect called, What marvelous tides!

"That's what moves water around in lakes and such, right?"

Yes, but the force comes from another gravitating body. Like the doomed star we saw at the edge of the great disk, torn apart.

Now the black hole is pulling on Argo, a bit more strongly on theside closer to the hole, than on the outer side. We feel that as tension, trying to pull the s.h.i.+p apart.

"d.a.m.n!" Toby told Besen this, then asked, "Can Argo take it?"

I believe so. The stress is annoying, that I concede -- "How would you know?"

I can generalize from my past life. Admittedly I do not feel your bodily discomfort, but-- "Or pleasures either, right?"

Quite so. I merely watch your visual input.

Toby didn't like the thought of Isaac even seeing some parts of his private life, and Besen's close warmth made him even more sure of it. It 131.

was embarra.s.sing, to think that his Aspects had been there, in some limited sense, in the warm, aromatic intimacy of the bedclothes...

Do not trouble over that. Our opinions mean nothing.

This was from s.h.i.+bo. A deeper, resonant voice that carried nuances that without warning drew him into her own interior world, the full spreading wealth of her past.--Her beloved Citadel beset by forces bleak and imponderable, ill-shaped and just beyond the deranged horizon. Would they come by seething air or across the cratered plain? And when? Or were their amba.s.sadors already inside the shut gates?--gray enemies no bigger than an eye's pupil, yet seeing just as much, and rapping back to their comradestheir microwave reports, machine tales of the soft goings here.-He regained his balance. "How... how come?"

Aspects are static. Aspects cannot grow. So their views do not alter. You cannot truly change their minds about anything.

Toby wasn't sure this was much consolation. He noted that s.h.i.+bo did not say that she could not change. Were Personalities different? He had the distinct impression, from subtle changes in Isaac and Joe and maybe even Zeno, that s.h.i.+bo was carrying out some sort of therapy on them, resolving the clas.h.i.+ng psyche-storms that beset such truncated minds.Then his distracted thoughts came to an abrupt end when a sudden wave flexed through the deck. He and Besen slammed into a bulkhead and tumbled to the deck of the Bridge.As he got up, Toby saw that Killeen had remained standing, legs braced to take surges. But the Cap'n's face was drawn and he searched the wall screens intently for understanding. They showed a blinding hail of gauzy hot gas and chunks of unknown matter, all spraying by them at blistering speed. Warm breezes now blew through the Bridge, fluttering Toby's hair as the circulators labored to ease the steady heating from outside.Killeen called again for the Magnetic Mind. Again there was no answer. It had abandoned them.The s.h.i.+p's officers were all anch.o.r.ed in their shock couches, staring at Killeen, visibly wondering why he did not strap himself in, too. Toby knew why. If he conceded even this small vulnerability, it would whittle him down in the eyes of those he now had to lead. So he turned and conspicuously paced, hands behind back, as another ripple shook the Bridge. He did not stumble, did not even slow his steady pace.Toby looked around, but there were no vacant shock couches for him and Besen. If they wanted to see what was going on, they would have to stand. n.o.body noticed them, or else they would have been hustled away.

All eyes watched the screens and the Cap'n.

132.

Killeen turned slowly, holding the Bridge crew with his level, stone-faced gaze. Then he saw Quath's head, s.h.i.+fty-gimballed in a hooded carapace, jutting into the Bridge entrance. The Cap'n called out with a faint note of desperation, "What do your brothers know about this place?"

"They never came back?"

Toby broke in. "How come you hunted humans, then? We could have been allies all along."

Toby gulped. Quath was no diplomat.

Killeen asked, "These 'texts' of yours--what do they say?"

"s.p.a.ce? h.e.l.l, what about the heat? And this stuff coming at us, big chunks--"

Some consolation, Toby thought. Probably they all were on the same trip.

"Did your brothers map this place?' Killeen demanded impaently. The screens swam with colors, forming and reforming into images that might make sense to the Myriapodia, Toby thought, but not to him.

The image was three-dimensional, shot through with gaudy rus.h.i.+ng dots. It whirled and jumped and made no sense. Then Quath squashed it down to two dimensions, and Toby could see what was happening.

133.

"That empty ball at the center--it's the black hole, right?" he asked his Isaac Aspect. He heard a rapid cross talk, Zeno's sad static-clogged phrases, entries spooling out from a text-chip he carried but could not read by himself.

Indeed. I consulted with Zeno, who agrees that these Myriapodia have correctly mapped the geometry near it, as well. The bulging, shaded region wrapped around the hole is the ergosphere--a zone where the black hole's spin warps everything, forcing s.p.a.ce-time to rotate with the hole itself.

"Sounds dangerous."

No one knows. Zeno's folk believed that the ergosphere was a place where nearly all the energy of a s.h.i.+p would be required simply to keep from falling into the black hole itself.

Toby watched the figure on the wall screens, the way the spin of the hole made a whirlpool in s.p.a.ce. Isaac told him that it was not matter spinning around there, but s.p.a.ce-time itself."Uh, what's s.p.a.ce-time? I mean, I know s.p.a.ce, and time's what a clock talks about, but..."Quath broke into his mind, transmitting directly.< p="">

Even the Myriapodia do not see s.p.a.ce-time. We, too, divide it into the easier ideas of distance and duration.>Until that moment Toby had not realized that Quath could pick up his whispering talks with his own Aspects. He felt embarra.s.sed, then irked--and then pushed aside his feelings. No time for that now."So how do we get out of here?"

134. "Huh?" Toby noticed the dashed line of their planned trajectory. It lifted some, then plunged toward the top crescent-shaped blob.

"Those? The crescents? They're awfully close to that ergosphere thing." The hazy crescents hovered like caps over the poles of the black hole, seeming to screen it.

Toby looked around, dazed more by the ideas that were coming thick and fast than by the fluttering, lurching waves that swept through Argo.

More tidal stresses, twisting with immense hands.

Then it dawned on him that everyone in the Bridge was looking at him. He blinked. Knowing his easy way with Quath, Killeen had just let Toby extract information from the alien. Well, it was efficient.

"So what do we do now?" Killeen studied Quath as if he could read an expression in the great, many-eyed head.

"It's going to get us out of this?"

Killeen paused, reflecting as the flickering screens lit the Bridge with eerie, s.h.i.+fting patterns. He was at the end of his tether, Toby saw, tired and confused. His heart went out to his father, caught in this huge engine of destruction, led here by hopes and legends, driven by fear. He let go of Besen and went to his father's side. Hesitantly, as Killeen watched the vibrant flux, he reached out and clasped Toby's arm.

They stood that way for a long moment, watching now as the Myriapodia s.h.i.+ps came into view. Against the seethe of sky and ma.s.s Toby saw ,that this place was not evil or good, but something far worse. It was I indifferent. Beauty lay here, and terror. It could witness anything, this churning machine. Its unforgivable vast resplendence mocked the human plight.

The glinting Myriapodia s.h.i.+ps held the huge cosmic hoop between them in a magnetic grip, and it glowed with intense brilliance. Isaac told Toby that the hoop was gathering energy as it fell toward the black hole. It pa.s.sed through the magnetic fields anch.o.r.ed in the hole and extracted from them strong currents, electrical surges that lit up the hoop like an immense sign.

"That the same as what the Magnetic Mind said?" Killeen whispered, eyes fixed on the screens. In the warming air the Bridge was silent.

Toby frowned. "Mech? What's mech-made here?"

"So? Just more of the weird weather here--"

135.

Killeen and Toby alike regarded Quath with disbelief. The alien went on, "But... the Cyaneans? Hard to believe," Killeen said. "Those things, they're huge."The Cosmic Circle had raced ahead of Argo now. Then on the major wall screen Toby saw ahead an enormous sheet--the Cyaneans. It was like a choppy gray sea, waves of blacks and troughs of white making s.h.i.+fting patterns as far as the eye could see.In the brilliant white-hot glare of yellows and reds that blazed up all around them, the eerie lack of color in the Cyaneans filled Toby with a sinking dread. He felt as though the bottom had fallen out of his stomach.

Only Besen steadied him, holding from one side while Toby stood with the other arm around his father. There was nothing here for mere humans to do.Ahead, the hoop plunged down into the gray, rippling expanse. And cut. Like a knife, it sheared through the ashen surface and deep, deep into the interior.Released, the edges of the strange dusky surface pulled away. They curled away from the Cosmic Circle, peeling back.But the hoop paid a price. It crumpled along its leading edge. The resistance of the turbulence dented and deformed it.Toby could not guess what colossal energies grappled there. The sharpness of the Cosmic Circle was a mere atom wide, his Isaac Aspect said, but its tight curvature was more than equal to the gray, storming surges. It pierced the tossing turbulence, sending sputtering hot light in its wake."What... what do we do?" Killeen asked quietly. Quath sent a chorus of lilting sounds through the human-linked sensorium, a plaintive long note of sympathy.Killeen made a sign to Jocelyn, who was watching him with round, frightened eyes. She turned the s.h.i.+p downward, into more of the blazing luminosity, toward the s.h.i.+fting gray sheet. Long moments pa.s.sed as the grayness swelled like an impa.s.sable wall of strangely s.h.i.+fting stone.They rushed into the shadowy gap carved by the hoop. To all sides peaks and valleys formed and dissolved, like mountains of ash made from burned bones.Fringes of the stuff washed over Argo and brought dizzying, reeling moments when Toby thought he had been s.n.a.t.c.hed up by his heels and shaken, upside down, hair fraying in the air. Crew vomited on the Bridge.

Others howled with fright and nausea. The s.h.i.+p's deep skeleton protested, popping and creaking.

136.

But the long pa.s.sage stayed open. Once cut, it peeled back to form new zones of contorted s.p.a.ce-time. Argo sped after the glowing, crumpling hoop.It seemed to take a long time to cross the thickness of the sliced Cyanean ghost-s.p.a.ce. Besen puked and gasped, mouth gaping and messed. But Toby held on to his father, not to steady him but to simply know that he was there.And then they were out, free. The hoop tumbled away, crushed. The Myriapodia s.h.i.+ps banked after it, grasping at the battered cosmic string, turning back toward the poles of the entire rotating system.Killeen found his voice. "Jocelyn. Try... try to follow them." Quath rattled her legs loudly, steel clanging and ringing. "What?" Killeen's mouth sagged.

Eaten up. Burned away."< p="">

Inward. >Killeen said flatly, "I don't believe it."Toby looked ahead of them. The ergosphere was a rotating fat waist in he diagram, but ahead bulged something spitting light like an angry, etting sun. Except that it extended away in a great, curving sheet. It arced into the distance, and Toby understood at last the size of the demon black hole that was the ultimate, hidden cause of all the cosmic violence he had witnessed. The vicious maw. The reason why the Galactic Center was a swarming, frying pit of death and loss.Through eye-stinging radiance he saw the spreading sheen where the hole came finally to rule even the fabric of the universe, clasping s.p.a.ce-time until it bent to the unending will of gravity.Through ten billion years the galaxy had fed it. Stars had perished, swept into it by the millions. And the civilizations that had thrived around those suns--they had been forced to flee or die.He wondered what planets that sun had once harbored, whether they had given birth to organic molecules that could link and replicate themselves, whether intelligence had once brimmed on those lost sh.o.r.es.

Whether creatures had glimpsed their fate, seen it as a boiling, growing presence in the sky. Perhaps they had known that at the dead center of such immense tragedy sat an absolute, unblinking void.

137. "The ergosphere?" Toby whispered.

A strong timbre was back in Killeen's voice. "Why?"

"Why?"

< p="">

As a star's weight rains upon the beast, the resulting splashes in s.p.a.ce- time open opportunities.> "To do what?"

"To where?"

"It's a gamble. If we wait--"

Toby studied Killeen. The glare surrounding Argo cut deep shadows in the face he knew so well, and in a hardening of the broad mouth Toby saw what they would do.

138.

Photovores Burning flowers rise from the disk. They blossom, spewing plasma seeds above and below the slow, spiraling churn.Bright tongues press out. Positron swarms. p.r.i.c.kly, annihilating all they touch.They dissolve where they strike the incoming, leaden matter. Antimatter spills and licks and dies. A blaze of hard gamma, cleansing purity.Their funeral pyre is an outward-ramming wall of pure photons. Intense, implacable. Pus.h.i.+ng back matter that wants to fall into the grasp of the gravity well.Electromagnetic stresses work along the surface of the expanding pressure-bubble. Green worms twisting. Dark oblongs of troubled ma.s.s slow, hesitate above the fray. The infall halts.Yet this is the food of the Eater itself, the raw material of the disk and all the following fury. The disk begins to starve. Not immediately, for light takes hours to cross the hurricane forests of furious, grinding gravity.Inertial moments tick on. The disk ebbs. In turn, its light pressure--now holding back a jostling layer of anxious, ionized ma.s.s--drains away.As the press of photons subsides, matter resumes its fatal fall. Again streams of black ma.s.s spiral down. The disk accepts this tribute. Fire-flowers again shatter clumps, smash molecules to atoms, strip atoms into bare charge.So goes the press and relax, press and relax. Perpetual armature. Fountain.

Life source.

Above the disk, safe from the sting, hang motes. Sheets, planes, herds.eUncountable. Billowing with the electromagnetic winds. Holding steady.

The photovores are grazing.They coast on the fitful breeze of electrons and protons blown out by the Eater's angry disk. Great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet spread, catching the particle wind's steady push. Vectoring.They apply magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. Turning, they wage a constant struggle to slip free of the Eater's gravitational tug.Yet they must use these ruling forces in their own perpetual, gliding dance. This is ordained.At times the herds fail to negotiate the complex balance of outward winds against the inward, seductive drag. Whole sheets will peel away.Some are cast into the shrouded ma.s.ses of molecular clouds, which are themselves soon to boil away. Others follow a helpless descending gyre.

Long before they would strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare hammers them.

They burst into tiny pinp.r.i.c.ks of dying light.But not now. A greater governing force approaches.Ink-dark lenses swivel to regard an intruder. Easing in from high along the Eater's axis, sensors see only ceramic slabs and high-impact buffers.

139.Intelligence sheathed against the torrent. Circuits an atom wide, filmy substrates, helium-cold junctions--all are vulnerable here to the sting of gamma rays and hard nuclei. Even the exalted wear armor.

But the photovores see only a presence they should honor. The vast sailing herds part. Ivory sheets curl back to reveal still deeper planes: yellow-gold light seekers.

These live to soak in photons and excrete microwave beams. With minds no more complex than the tube worms of ancient oceans, they are each a single electromagnetic gut, head to tail. Placid conduits.

Dimly they know that this descending presence is the cause of their being. Herds shear apart in reverence for its pa.s.sage.

A trembling chorus of greeting. The coasting ma.s.s ignores them.

Their hissing microwaves waver. Momentary confusion. Then come fresh orders. They focus all their abundance upon the pa.s.sing presence. The visitor needs more power here. They feed it.

Accelerating, it mashes a few of the herd on its carapace. It never notices the layers and mult.i.tudes peeling back, their gigahertz voices joined in glad chorus. They are plankton. It ingests their offering without heed.

In any case, a worsening discussion preoccupies it.Our/Your deception went well. But I/We do not like their close approach to the Wedge.The infalling star lashes the disk. They will probably perish there quite soon.They may make use of turbulence.I/You have been trying to understand their way of thinking. Let us discourse in their style of two-valuedness. It may serve to antic.i.p.ate their moves.Like this? I am merely me?And I am a sole self as well. See how simple?Stunted. Awkward.Yet this is how they live.As an experiment, I accept. The concept of "me" is so limiting.

Nevertheless--Report!

140.Our direct intrusion into their craft went as planned. We interrogated their systems with the bolt of electrical discharges.These craft-systems are loyal to us?No. They cannot be, without destroy ing themselves.We cannot master such minds?They spring from an era whenthe primates knew how to protectagainst us.Did they yield up the secrets we seek?Not entirely. They know that thisheritage the humans have is em bedded in hard matter.Improbable, on the face of it.Though true, apparently.Who would ever use such savagemethods?e The primates were in decline whenthey devised this record, recall. Anyelectrical memory we would even tually subvert.So it is in their s.h.i.+p?Apparently, but not all of it. Encased inmatter somehow. The Legacies, theyterm it. But the vessel of containmentis not clear.This clarifies matters.

We mustvaporize their craft.Not all the needed information is there.

141.Where is the rest of it?We do not know.

Is this why they speak to the magnetic Phylum?To lodge their secrets there? Thatwould make our task difficult.You might be able to force compliance from that Phylum.To do so entails moving enough ma.s.sto interrupt their field lines ma.s.sively.The energetics are daunting.Let you hope that is not called for.Perhaps it is best to probe further,despite the dangerous warp of thequasi-mechanicals' hoop-discontinu ity.With the same energies, directed into the heart of their craft, they would be vapor now.Be mindful: The electrical discharges we devised infested their very innermost intelligences. Their own electrominds--of limited breadth, but useful--now listen for us.Can they find these Legacies?They already have some of them.Excellent! What are they?

A guide to the location of their owngenetic heritage.A genome map?Apparently.

142.That is of no danger to us.Apparently.

You seem uncertain.There are odd traces of data woven into the code. Useless, it would seem.'' '.

Errors, probably.iI"

I wish we could be sure.One must live with such ambiguities.,.i It is of our and your nature to toleratethem.Absence of evidence is not evidenceof absence.There are no clear signs that anyprimates have reached the Wedge in along time.Some surely have gotten through.Many of us dislike talk of the Wedge."'.

Now who is uncomfortable withI.

ambiguity?The decision to a.s.sault the Wedge long ago came from all of us.No--it was mostly yours.That is oversimplified! I knew this division into two selves would vex me! See? It leads to blame--self-blame.

Surely you must admit that the idea, to carve the Wedge to pieces with a hoop-discontinuity, was a good one.Except that the Wedge swallowed thehoops.

143.

We need not dwell on memories. TheWedge will yield to us in time.

Exactly, though not the way you mean.The Wedge is in time--which is whywe cannot reach it.

Our science will master it eventually.

We have surpa.s.sed all else that ventured here. What matters this, if they enter the Wedge?

We have deployed a relay point. It willperch at the lip of the Wedge, pickingup signals from their craft, sendingthem to us.

That requires great energy of the relay s.h.i.+p. Only the Wedge can hang suspended against the slide of s.p.a.ce.