by Greg Bear
Dumbfounded, Anna watched the final act on her sensors and tapped her fingers on the Heuritex.
Probability fell apart at the ergosphere interface of a singularity. Whether the same conditions applied to a naked singularity or not, Graetikin didn’t know—he guessed they would.
But they wouldn’t have to face the danger of the tidal forces—there would be no event horizons, no overt indication of in-rushing space-time. The singularity ahead had collapsed from a star oblated by the presence of other stars, and the result was a hole in space-time stretched out into a line. If conditions still applied here, he’d have to figure their chances of survival on a near-intuitive hunch.
It was clear to Graetikin now. Inter-universe connections of necessity were devoid of probabilities. They were truce zones between regions of differing qualities, differing constants. Hence, somewhere above the singularity, reshaping of in-falling material had to take place.
Perhaps the Aighors weren’t far wrong after all.
He worked all his findings into a single tight-packed signal on several media, and broadcast it to space in general. When he was finished he turned to Disjohn and Edith and said, “Feels good to toss out a bottle, anyway. If someone picks it up, well and good. If not, we’ve lost a few terawatts.”
Kamon could either back off, let them escape and hope for an encounter later, or he could pursue to the very end. But he was becoming fatalistic. It seemed the Fairchild ship was behaving not with human insanity, but with divine irrationality—a shield to his Venging. That could imply they were operating in the Grace of the Thrina, not against it. He wished he could consult the Council about this new insight, but there was no time. Whether correct or not, it made him reluctant to interfere. That small reluctance made him hesitate.
“No!” he shouted, pounding his thorax in disgust. “They are only insane! There is no Grace upon them!”
But it was too late. He had followed the Fairchild ship into the nebulosity on a matching course. They could only construe that as an intention to continue the chase.
Since they were insane, they would destroy themselves.
In his self-rage, he considered destroying the Nestor ship for personal satisfaction. But he had other things to do. He had to prepare himself mentally for the Fall. He told the others to begin their rituals.
They would follow all the way in.
“Course plotted,” the computer told Graetikin. “There will be a proper configuration at these points on the chart. We can meet the singularity’s affect-field here, or here—that is, at these points in our future-line. If we fail within any width of time measurably in quantum jump intervals, we will come in at a closer angle, and the warp-wave of our approach will create a temporary event horizon which will destroy us. These are our options.”
“Initiate the action and test it on a closed loop. Then choose the best approach and put us there. Kamon hasn’t left our tail?”
“No, he still follows. And still jams.”
“Then my message didn’t get through.” Somehow it didn’t matter much.
Fairchild gave the final order. Edith watched from his side with a small, knowing smile. She was trying to remember her childhood. There had been so many pleasant things then. She’d married Disjohn, in fact, because he reminded her of the strength of her father.
She needed that strength now.
She wished she had the strength of a father near.
The ship was otherwise empty. Her corridors echoed as the impact of the nebula’s clouds bucked her and made her groan.
The tiny neutron star pulsated regularly, surrounded by a halo of accelerated particles, a natural generator of radio energy. The two normal singularities orbited each other, light-days apart. The violet influx of gases outlined them clearly. Like two whirlpools whose surfaces have been smeared with oil, they glowed in disparate, shimmering mazes of light. Starlight ran in rings around them. Ghost images of each other flickered in the rings, and the ghosts carried rings of stars, and images of other ghosts.
The universe was being twisted into ridiculous failures and inconceivable alterations.
Here time and space rushed into multi-dimensional holes so rapidly that an object had to move at the speed of light to stay in one place. It was a Red Queen’s race on a cosmic scale.
In drawing diagrams of what happens in the singularity below the event horizons, space and time axes cross and replace each other. The word “singularity” itself is a phrase of no more significance than “boojum.” It implies points in any mathematical fabric where results start coming out in infinities.
Thus, Graetikin knew, they would soon step off the pages of one book which had told their lives until now, leave that book behind and everything associated with it, and risk a plunge into null.
The naked singularity invisibly approached.
Kamon’s thoughts grew fuzzy and uncoordinated. He bristled with rage as one portion of his mind came unbalanced in the ritual, and kicked out with his tail at the bulkhead before him. He dented the inch-thick steel. Then he regained his balance.
The holy display of the black holes dominated everything.
He was ready. A tiny reserved part of him set his weapons for a last-ditch attempt, then vanished into the calm pool of his prepared being.
Disjohn Fairchild felt a giddiness he’d never known before, as if he were being spun on a carnival toy, but every part of him felt it differently.
“I’m expanding,” Lady Fairchild said. “I’m getting bigger. Alice down the rabbit hole—”
Still the ship fell.
And fell.
Edith gasped. The bridge darkened for the blink of an eye, then was suddenly aglow with scattered bits of ghost lightning. She held her hands in front of her eyes and saw a blue halo around them like Cherenkov radiation.
Expansion. Alteration. The desk in front of her, and her arms on the desk, broke into color-separated images and developed intricate networks of filigree, became crystalline, net-like, tingled and shimmered and pulsed, then repeated in reverse and became solid again. Everything smelled of dust and age, musty, like vast libraries.
Both ships ended their existence in status geometry at the same moment.
Kamon followed at a different angle and hit the affect-field at the same instant the Fairchild ship did. As he had known and expected, his warp-wave created a temporary event horizon and he was divested of his material form.
The Fairchild ship survived its fall. Graetikin’s equations, thus far, were wholly accurate.
None of them could conceive of what happened in the interface. It was not chaos—it was instead a sea of quiet, an end to action. The destruction and rearrangement of rules and constants led to a lassitude of space-time, an endless sargasso of thought and event, mired and tangled and gray.
Then each experienced that peculiar quality of his or her worldline which made them unique. Fairchild, stable and strong, did not see much to surprise him. Graetikin marveled at a new insight into his work. Edith, still wrapped in her childhood, had a nightmare and woke far in her past, screaming for her father.
Again the darkness. The ouroboros of the hole spat them out. The computers triggered a lengthy jump, as best as they were able, for the actions of their smallest circuits were still not statistically reliable. This was the chance Graetikin knew they all had to take.
They escaped. The ship rattled and shook like a dog after a swim. The howl of metal made Fairchild’s scalp prickle and his arm-hair stand on end. A rush of wind swept the bridge. Edith Fairchild wept quietly and Disjohn, beside her, trembled.
They held each other, sweat dripping and noses flaring, panicked like wild beasts. Graetikin bounced his fingers clumsily over the screen controls, then corrected his foul-up and gave them a view of what lay outside.
“I don’t see anything,” Fairchild s
aid.
“I’m astonished we made it,” Graetikin whispered. Disjohn gave him a wild look. The screen showed nothing but cold darkness.
“Scan and chart all radiating sources,” the captain instructed the computer.
“There are no compact sources of radiation. Standard H-R distribution shows nothing. There is only an average temperature,” it said.
“What’s the temperature?”
“Two point seven one degrees Kelvin.”
Graetikin slammed his scriber onto the panel. “Any white hole activity? Any sign of the singularity we just came through?”
“Nothing.”
“We had to come out of something!”
“Undefined,” the machine said.
“What does it mean?” Edith asked, holding her chin in her hands.
Graetikin fingered the mar his scriber had made in the panel. “It means we’re in a region of heat-death.”
“Where’s that?”
“Undefined,” the computer repeated.
“‘Where’ is meaningless now,” Graetikin said, eyes dull. “Everything’s evenly distributed. We’re between beats, at the top of a cycle between expansion and collapse. We’ve escaped into a dead universe.”
“What can we do?” Disjohn asked. He felt an intense ache for his wife, and wished she were at his side. The grief was so strong, it seemed he had lost her only recently. He looked at Edith. She resembled her mother so much his throat ached. He patted his daughter on the head, but felt none of the reassurance he was trying to give.
“We might go into stasis and wait it out. But we’d have to have a timer, something measuring the progress of the universe outside us. Tens of billions of years. I don’t think any of our instruments would last that long.”
“There has to be a way!” Fairchild said.
“I told you, Father,” Edith said. “We were the offenders.” She did a mad little dance. “I told you. We didn’t prepare. Why—”
Graetikin thought of them waiting until the ship ran out of energy and food and breathable air. Years, certainly. But years with a burnt-out old politician and his pre-pubescent daughter, a triangle of agonizing possibilities. Even could they survive, they would have no basis for a new life.
Edith’s face showed white and distorted. “Why, we’re in hell!”
Nestor’s ship rounded the nebula and waited. Anna asked the Heuritex several times if anything had been sighted, and each time it replied in the negative. “There is no sign,” it said finally. “We would do well to return home.”
“Nothing left,” Anna said. She couldn’t convince herself she had done all she could.
“One moment, madame,” the Heuritex said. “This region was devoid of Thrina before.”
“So?”
“There is a signal emerging from the black holes. A single Thrina tone, very strong.”
“That’s what started this whole thing,” Anna said quietly. “Ignore it, and let’s go home.”
On the edges of the Rift, the old and the sick, the detritus of civilization awaiting rebirth elsewhere, the Aighor pilgrims received the Thrina, and there was rejoicing.
The death-ships resumed their voyages.
Afterword
“The Venging” is not just about black holes, of course; I’m laying out the details of a space economy that lives and breathes information. This is not the first such prognostication of the Information Age, what I will later (in Slant) call the Dataflow age, but it’s an early example. Anna’s tapas (the root word in Sanskrit denotes “heat,” and the word itself refers to deep meditation) is now to some extent available as tablet computers and smart phones. For historical perspective, however, remember some of the books and movies and TV shows that were influencing me: Forbidden Planet, John Brunner’s heavily cybernetic Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up, and Star Trek’s tricorder.
In 1977, in the wake of the success of Star Wars, studios and producers all over Los Angeles woke up to find the motion picture landscape changing drastically. Science fiction films—formerly relegated to B-movies by the critics, and occasional blockbusters such as Forbidden Planet and 2001: A Space Odyssey—were rapidly becoming standard fare and very profitable.
I was living in Long Beach at the time with my first wife, Tina. I published an article in the Los Angeles Times Calendar section, describing the roots of Star Wars in written SF. Suddenly, I started fielding calls from producers all at sea about science fiction, and over the next few weeks, I took a number of interesting meetings. I had a lovely lunch with Gene Roddenberry, who was planning a television reincarnation of Star Trek. Mr. Roddenberry had appreciated a comment I made in my article about how science fiction was the kind of horse best ridden by an individual, and how studios turned these stories into camels—a horse designed by a committee.
I met with a number of people at Dino De Laurentiis Productions, and had the pleasure of explaining why hot air rises to Dino’s son, who, sadly, died a few years later in a plane accident. De Laurentiis was about to go forward with an ill-conceived but beautifully art-directed version of Flash Gordon, and had already optioned Frank Herbert’s Dune. I tried to convince them to film one of my favorite novels, The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson’s, but no go. Also nix on Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero.
I heard from a friend, Rick Sternbach, that Disney Studios was working on a film involving a black hole. The project’s name at that stage was Space Probe One. Here, I thought, was a sterling opportunity. I called the studios and asked about the possibility of becoming a technical advisor. I carried a folio of paintings and a total devotion to the idea of black holes and how they would look. My first meeting was with famed designer John Mansbridge, who then passed me on to Peter Ellenshaw, a master craftsman responsible for matte paintings in many movies. He was art director on Space Probe One. (He was also the father of Harrison Ellenshaw, another fine matte artist who produced backgrounds for Star Wars and many subsequent films.)
I showed all who were interested my painting of a black hole, done as a possible cover for “The Venging.” As I spoke with Ellenshaw, studio head Ron Miller (no relation to the astronomical artist) came into Ellenshaw’s office to chat, and was soon followed by the screenwriter. He seemed a little out of his depth, but Miller was faithfully sticking with him, and that was and is rare in movies.
It was a heady afternoon. Mansbridge told me I might be called on board the production as a sketch artist. I thought I was better suited to being a technical advisor, or even a script consultant, but what the hell. It was a job, and an interesting one.
I left behind the issue of Galaxy Magazine that contained “The Venging.”
I never got the job.
Eventually, Space Probe One became The Black Hole. It was Peter Ellenshaw’s last film, a beautiful production incorporating many technical advances, but otherwise it was pretty abysmal. Oddly enough, there had been a change made in the original movie concept. After passing through the film’s glowing, geometric toilet-bowl of a black hole, the good guys end up in a kind of mystical heaven—painted onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The bad guy, played by German actor Maximilian Schell, ends up quite literally in a Dantean Hell, entombed in his evil robot and surrounded by flames.
Shades of the end of “The Venging”? We’ll never know, very likely.
It was ironic, however, that this multi-million dollar production thudded to a halt with an awful pun. The evil robot is named Maximilian. Maximilian Schell ends up in Hell, in Maximilian’s shell.
I wonder if anyone at Disney got the joke.
As an after-after-note, I called Disney Studios at one point and Ron Miller answered the phone. Wow! I’ve never had that experience since—or talked to another studio head in person, for that matter. Charming.
After-after-after note: I could not quite understand why Anna was so down o
n living forever in this and subsequent stories. Clearly, I was working through some ethical issues. But most of my fiction avoided the topic of biological immortality in later years. (In the Thistledown books, people die but have their mentalities uploaded into City Memory—a prospect that seems to me less and less likely, barring transporter-beam superscience.)
I further explored my issues and objections to biological immortality in Vitals, published in early 2002. I doubt that I’ve reached any final conclusions, however.
Neither did Anna, as we learn in “Perihesperon.”
Perihesperon
In the middle and late seventies, Roger Elwood was cutting a swath through science fiction with a plethora of anthologies and a line of SF novels published by Harlequin in Canada, famed for knock-‘em-out-by-the-ream formulaic romances, much loved by a large group of devoted readers. Elwood’s line was called Laser Books, and it was advertised to the trade through catalogs minus author names—a no-no in science fiction publishing, where readers care who is writing what. The line folded, but not before publishing novels by Tim Powers, R. Faraday Nelson, and many other up-and-coming writers. I never wrote a Laser Book, but I did sell a short story to one of Elwood’s original anthologies, Tomorrow: New Worlds of Science Fiction.
This was my first appearance in hardcover (1975, the same year as “The Venging”) and needless to say, I was extremely pleased with myself. I was living with my first wife, Tina, in an apartment in Costa Mesa, writing and painting and trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps while fitfully marketing a novel called Hegira. I was a newlywed, idealistic and energetic, and I remember those years as pretty good times, full of growth.
I was most of the way through another novel, a time travel piece called The Kriti Cylinder that would get shelved before it was sent out to publishers. And I was plotting a story called “Mandala,” which was later bought by Robert Silverberg for his anthology New Dimensions 8.
