Colonization

by Alex Lang

  “It will grow to be about three feet long, but I’ll donate it to the New York Aquarium before then. They have a salamander exhibit that’s second to none.”

  “I’ve been there,” I said. “But it was long ago.”

  “Then we must go sometime!”

  She had that way of talking, straight and to the point, but always from an unexpected direction.

  “Alice, I was wondering …”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s like the expansion of space. The enormity of it all. I mean, I know we just met, but ah, eh

  …” I hemmed and I hawed. I felt so embarrassed. Here I was, a former linguistics major, and I couldn’t string proper sentences together!

  She smiled. “You’re thinking about the enormity of the cosmos, aren’t you? Well, the universe is vast. Did you know scientists believe we can only detect five percent of the content of our universe? The other ninety-five percent has disappeared over the time horizon, the point at which objects are so far away that light emitted by them will never reach us. In other words, not only is most everything unknown, most everything is unknowable. The only difference between us and him”-she pointed at the axolotl-“is that we’re swimming in a different aquarium.”

  She paused, then said, “Shall I show you what you came here for?”

  I gulped. “Yes.”

  “It’s in the bedroom.”

  It seemed to take an eternity to make our way down the red- carpeted hallway that led to

  Alice’s sleeping chamber. She kept talking all the while, but I can’t remember a word of what she said, other than it had something to do with the structure of space.

  When we reached the room she ushered me inside with a wave of her hand. “After you.”

  The room was pitch black. Instead of turning on the lights, she lit a half-dozen candles on a dresser that rested against the far wall. They flared up like little supernovas, casting wandering shadows on the walls. I sighed when I saw her queen-sized bed in one corner, the lace sheets warm and inviting.

  But that was not all that I saw.

  The ceiling was covered with glow-in-the-dark stars. They’d been arranged to form a replica of the winter night sky. Aldebaran was a shining red jewel in the constellation Taurus. Orion the Hunter contained the bright stars Rigel and Betelgeuse and the three smaller stars that formed the magnificent belt. Directly overhead, in the constellation Andromeda, was a prominent oval patch which, I assumed, represented the Andromeda galaxy. The closet galaxy to our own, it was barely visible to the naked eye; here it was brighter than anything else on the ceiling. Alice had taken great pains to ensure the correctness of her overhead mural and this deviation seemed odd.

  I was conscious of strange gurgling sounds coming from the back of the room. Looking down, I saw a filtration device, perhaps three feet wide by two feet tall. It was wedged in one

  corner next to a casement window whose shades were tightly drawn. A simple canister filter, it worked by suctioning liquid into a canister through an entry pipe and pumping the liquid out through a return pipe. Both pipes were visible wrapping around the room and disappearing into a bedroom closet.

  When Alice saw me gazing at the filter, she said, “A hobby of mine. I put this one together with parts from a local surplus store.”

  What she didn’t tell me was what the filter was doing in her bedroom.

  Just then I heard her sigh. She had removed her cardigan and sandals. Her green eyes sparkled in the flickering candlelight and the smile that played on her lips could only have meant one thing.

  I was wondering if the time had come for me to kiss her when she went over to the bedroom closet and pulled open the door.

  “In here.”

  As I peered into the closet I saw an inky black void.

  “It’s in the corner,” she whispered.

  And that was when I saw it: underneath the bottommost shelf, a pinpoint of light. It was only a point, no wider than the end of a pencil, but it was so bright, so intense, that it seemed much larger. “Yes,” I said. “I see it now. Amazing!”

  I paused. “But I’m confused. You said you were going to show me your black hole. This is something else.”

  “No,” she replied. “This is what I mentioned.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look closely,” she said, “and tell me what you see.”

  Trembling, I entered the closet and got down on my hands and knees to examine the entity, but the angle wasn’t right.

  “It’s easiest to view if you lie on your back and look up,” she said.

  Thus positioned, I gazed upon the radiant jewel’s infinite expanse. I saw everything that ever was, I saw everything that ever would be. Everything was clearly visible in the depths of the black hole. I saw my birth in a hospital in Athens, Ohio. I witnessed my recovery from the childhood illness that nearly killed me. I saw my baptism, I saw my high-school graduation. The look of pride on my parents’ faces when I was admitted to Columbia on full scholarship. I witnessed the car accident which claimed my brother’s life when I was in my freshman year. The agonizing aftermath. The long and lonely evenings drinking in bars around Manhattan wondering what any of it meant. I saw myself meeting Alice in a restaurant on Forty-Third Street. And I watched in wonder when the circle became complete as she took me to her apartment and showed me the black hole.

  “Why doesn’t it consume what lies around it?” I asked. “You, me, this room, everything.”

  “They don’t work that way,” she replied. “At least not the little ones.”

  I told Alice I felt like I was in a tale by Jorge Louis Borges. “The Aleph.” One of my favorites. She smiled. “The Argentinian’s aleph was a figment of his imagination. Mine exists.”

  I asked her what was inside the black hole, that is, what was on the other side of the black

  hole.

  “Another world, much like ours.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Perhaps I’ve been there?” She laughed. Her green eyes sparkled and I found myself gazing longingly at her pearly white throat. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starved,” she continued. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

  Without waiting for a reply, she ushered me into the dining room. She apologized for leftovers, but assured me Indian food tasted better after the spices had time to meld.

  As we consumed a delicious meal of tandoori chicken, vegetable biryani, and garlic nan, we continued to discuss the nature of the universe.

  “It says in here,” I began, holding up my copy of On the Origins of the Universe, “that the cosmos is actually the inside of a monstrous black hole, a black hole which will expand forever, or until it fades from existence.”

  Alice laughed. “I know what the book says, but it’s wrong.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t understand the details of the author’s argument. The mathematics involved. But he seems to make his case.”

  “It’s hogwash.”

  “He sets forth a reductio ad absurdum that-”

  “-that is itself absurd.”

  “So what are they? Black holes. You said you study them. The author of my book calls them portals to the past. Are they that or something else?”

  “It’s been mathematically proven that you can’t revisit the past,” she said, “but you can change the rate at which you go into the future.”

  “You mean black holes are portals to other worlds?”

  “I mean no such thing,” she said. Too quickly, I thought; there was something behind her words. She rose from the table and began clearing the dishes. “They’re permanent fixtures of our universe, nothing more. Scientific curiosities. Leading nowhere.”

  “That reminds me of a question I had earlier,” I said. “The black hole in your closet is a point of light. I didn’t think they emitted light.”

  Alice smiled. “You’re correct. The gravitational attraction of a black hole is so strong not even light can escape, that is, on
ce light rays have crossed the event horizon they’re gone forever. What you may not realize is that to you, as an observer, the light approaching a black hole never crosses inside. You observe it get closer and closer, witness an ever-increasing halo of light that seems to surround the hole, a blinding white light that has, in reality, long-since vanished.”

  “The black hole becomes a white one?”

  “To the observer, yes. It’s a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the amount of disorder in a closed system must remain constant. Since information is a measure of the disorder of a system, the amount of information in a closed system remains constant. The universe is a closed system. A black hole removes information from the universe. If the light a black hole captured disappeared from the observer’s sight, the information content of the universe would decrease, violating the law.”

  “Doesn’t that imply that the black hole is effectively a second universe, or possibly a portal to such a place?”

  Alice smiled. “It’s late and I’m tired,” she said. “We can talk more about this later.” She drew me to her and kissed me. “Wait,” I said, attempting to remove her arms that encircled my waist. “Since the universe is expanding, at some point the light from a distant section of the cosmos will no longer be able to reach us. In other words, the object which emitted the light will disappear from the universe, reducing its disorder in violation of the second law. And that means we’re living inside a black hole.”

  In response, Alice pulled me to her and kissed me once again, passionately this time. And, this time, I did not resist.

  When I awoke the next morning, Alice was nowhere to be seen. I dressed and went downstairs to the kitchen. No Alice.

  I looked at the clock on the wall: 9:15 a. m. I remembered Alice telling me she had an eight o’clock class that morning. The topic: exoplanets. She’d beamed when she told me she’d assembled half-a-dozen film clips to illustrate the topic. Shot in lavish detail-she laughed when she told me she’d filmed on location-they were sure to be a hit with her students.

  Just then I spied a note on the counter. She’d written that she wouldn’t return until six, that I was to make myself at home, and not to worry about dinner for she’d be bringing home

  Chinese. It certainly seemed an invitation to stay.

  Which I did.

  ***

  A week later I moved in. Alice made it clear it was her apartment and she was allowing me to stay only on a trial basis. She would be up at the crack of dawn and wouldn’t return until evening so it would be my responsibility to have dinner prepared. Further, I was to do the grocery shopping and the laundry once a week. I wasn’t working, so I had nothing against this arrangement. She laughed when she added she was lucky to have found me. But she always had a mischievous look about her and I never knew whether to take her seriously.

  During the day I spent my time reading and taking care of the apartment as Alice had instructed. I also enjoyed watching the fish tank for long periods of time. Another unusual fish soon joined the speculated goldfish and the salamander-like creature. This creature was eel-like, long and slender, with wide dorsal fins and green-and-blue pectoral fins. It was covered with downy-white cilia which undulated as it moved across the tank. I’d never seen anything like it. When I asked Alice about it she told me she’d acquired it on one of her recent travels and that its mate would be arriving soon. She didn’t tell me the name of the species nor where the purchase had been made and I didn’t ask. I had a hunch as to what was going on and to tell the truth I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. The importation of exotic specimens was illegal in this day and age.

  Most evenings our discussions extended late into the night. They usually involved astronomical topics, and her knowledge about that subject seemed limitless. But she had questions as well. For all her scientific knowledge, she seemed ignorant about human history and was constantly peppering me with questions about culture and politics. Questions I often found amusing.

  One conversation in particular sticks in my mind. It was a Friday evening in early December. The wind was howling, the naked branches of the elm trees grating against the windows. We’d just finished dinner, when I popped the question that had been bothering me for weeks:

  “The universe is expanding,” I said. “That I know and understand. But doesn’t that imply that we are expanding as well?”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  “Space is expanding, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “The atoms which make us up are part of space-exist in space, do they not?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then the distance between the atoms must be expanding, that is, we ourselves are expanding.”

  She laughed-how I loved her childish laugh-“First you say we’re shrinking because the cosmos is expanding, now you say we’re expanding because the cosmos is expanding. Which do you mean?”

  “I guess I really don’t know,” I said, gazing at her quizzically. “I’m thoroughly confused!”

  “I’ll tell you how it is,” she said, “though I don’t think my explanation will satisfy you.”

  She took my hand and led me to the couch in her living room. I heard the tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the hall. The timepiece was encased in a cabinet made from stained cherry that had been etched with an intricate design depicting the planets and the stars.

  “From the point of view of the universe we are expanding,” she explained. “From our point of view, we’re contracting. In other words, we’re both expanding and contracting and at the same rate. The effects cancel each other out, but they are happening.”

  “Wouldn’t that mean we’d be dizzy all the time?” I meant it in jest, but she didn’t laugh.

  “We aren’t. And that’s because we don’t notice what’s happening. The effect is rather small.”

  I frowned. “What you say might be true,” I said. “Nevertheless, I don’t like it.”

  “I didn’t think you would.” She smiled. The candlelight danced across her pretty green eyes.

  I looked over at the fish tank and saw that the axolotl seemed to be watching us, or me.

  Alice continued, “Have you considered the possibility that it’s not the universe you’re preoccupied with, it’s something else, something within this universe and around which you revolve?”

  “Like?”

  “Me, perhaps?”

  I felt my cheeks redden.

  “My dear,” she said with a sigh. “It’s rather obvious, isn’t it? You’re falling in love with me!”

  I sighed. Alice could be so disarming.

  “But this discussion will have to wait for another time. Tomorrow I’m off to the Twelfth International Conference on Astrophysics. I’ll be gone a week.”

  I looked around the room. I’d only moved my things the month before and wasn’t sure how she’d feel about my being here alone.

  “You can stay, of course,” she said. Only one thing I insist on: don’t open the closet. With me being gone for days, the temptation might become too great.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “I’d love nothing more than to study the black hole.”

  “I’m sure you would,” she said. “But without me to guide you-well, the thing is rather dangerous. If you were to get too close …”

  “I promise I’ll be careful.”