She focused on the screen:
At night the sea is very loud,
And voices ride the tide.
At another time, in another place,
Beneath the silent moon,
We laughed together.
“My God,” said Matt.
Jon nodded. “It’s a poem.”
Jim reported other structures under the snow near the landing site. “More towers,” he said. “Upslope.”
They nodded to each other. The rest of the ski lift.
THEY BROKE THE translation effort down to a system. Jim provided the most literal rendition possible, and Hutch interpreted as best she could. Sometimes it became necessary to infer meaning, as in the case of the adjective in
…The relentless river
Carrying us toward the night.
It might have been lovely, or idyllic, or any of countless other possibilities. But the context provided evidence for a good guess.
One line was straight out of The Rubaiyat:
…This vast gameboard of nights and days.
The poems seemed primarily, almost exclusively, concerned with lost love and early death. They were scattered throughout the book, located perhaps between a description of the hotel restaurant and an advertisement that might have had to do with sexual services.
The Preston AI broke in. “Hutch.”
“What do you have, Phyl?”
“There are three omega clouds in the area. Outbound at a distance of 1.8 light-years. Moving toward NGC6760.”
“Moving away from here?”
“Yes. What makes them interesting is that they are traveling abreast, in formation, along a line 6.1 light-years long. Straight as an arrow. The interior omega is two light-years from the end of the line.”
She waited, apparently expecting Hutch to respond. “You’re suggesting,” she said, “there’s one missing.”
“Exactly. We know these things tend to travel in orchestrated groups. Either the interior cloud should be in the middle, or there should be a cloud two light-years from the other end.”
“The missing cloud—” said Jon.
“Would have passed through this area. Three hundred years ago.”
THEY TALKED ABOUT putting everyone into the Preston for the remainder of the voyage. Let the AI do the navigation for the McAdams. There was a risk in doing that: If a glitch showed up somewhere, a cable came loose, a short developed in the wiring, there’d be nobody to fix it, and they’d lose the ship. The chance of such an event was remote, but it could happen. Matt argued against the idea, offered to ride alone if Jon wanted to join Hutch and Antonio. But he explained he felt responsible for the McAdams. She thought maybe he liked being on the bridge, and thought about suggesting they ride on his ship, but her instincts told her not to do it. Maybe she also liked being on the bridge.
ANTONIO’S NOTES
I’ll never understand Hutch. She’s one of the most optimistic people I know, but she’s convinced we’re all going to hell in a handcart. I asked her tonight whether she really thinks civilizations can’t survive long term. She looked straight at me and asked whether I’d give a monkey a loaded gun.
—Wednesday, January 2
chapter 31
THERE WAS A possibility the flight to Tenareif would be nonproductive, for the simple reason they might not be able to find the black hole. It had been detected by its gravitational effects on nearby stars. No companion was known to exist. If that was indeed the case, and there was no matter nearby, no dust or hydrogen or incoming debris to light the thing up, it would be invisible. Nothing more than a deeper darkness in the night. And looking for it would require a risk Hutch wasn’t prepared to take. Furthermore, there’d be no point in it anyhow since, even if they found it, there’d be nothing to see.
If the outside universe was about to acquire a flavor of weirdness, the climate inside the Preston had also changed. Not dramatically. Not in ways that Hutch could have explained. Antonio remained upbeat and encouraging. He could sit for hours trading barbs and gags, describing misadventures while trying to cover political events, natural disasters, and even occasional armed rebellions. “Got shot at once, in the Punjab. You believe that? Somebody actually tried to kill me. I was doing an interview with a local warlord and got in the way of an assassin.”
“You didn’t get hit, I hope?”
“In the hand.” He showed her a burn scar. “She—it was a woman—wanted a clear shot, and I was in the way. It was a bad moment.”
“I guess.”
“I mean, it’s got a special kind of significance, knowing that someone, a perfect stranger, wants to take your life.”
“Well,” Hutch said, “at least it wasn’t personal. She wasn’t after you. She just wanted to clear the area.”
“You can say that. It felt personal to me.”
“Why did she want him dead?”
“You’d think it was political, right?”
“Sure.”
“That she was from an oppressed group of some sort?”
“She wasn’t?”
“She was a government worker who’d been terminated. She got the warlord confused with the local bosses and tried to take him out. She should have been after the chief of the tax bureau.”
“Incredible.”
“No wonder they booted her.”
But if Antonio remained the same, the atmosphere had nevertheless changed. Maybe it was her. There was less reading and game-playing and VR. The climate had become more personal, the sense of isolation more acute. Rudy had been simply one of her two passengers during the first two legs of the flight. Now, with him gone, he’d become something infinitely more, a companion, a reflection of her own soul, an anchor in a turbulent time.
They talked about Rudy every day, how they would see that his memory was kept, how he would have been overjoyed at the poetry in the Sigma Hotel Book. How they missed him.
Hutch even began listening to country music, which she’d never done before. Years behind everybody else in her generation, she discovered Brad Wilkins, who always sang about moving on, and about the darkness outside the train windows.
When Antonio suggested they were becoming morose, that they should try to put the Sigma Hotel staircase behind them, Hutch agreed but really thought it was best to talk it out. Gradually, as the days passed, politics and black holes began to dominate the conversation. Rudy receded.
Three weeks and two days after leaving Sigma 2711, they arrived in the area that was home to Tenareif, roughly one and a half light-years from the position of the black hole.
They did a second jump, and, when they came out, Phyl announced immediately that she could see the target. “Take a look,” she said.
She put it on-screen: a luminous ring.
“That’s the accretion disk,” said Antonio. “It circles the black hole.”
“If not for the extra shielding,” said Phyl, “we wouldn’t want to come this close.”
“That bad, Phyllis?”
“Very high levels of X-rays and gamma rays. Higher than theory predicts.”
“I guess they’ll have to revise the theory.” She saw a second object, glowing dully nearby. A planet. With an atmosphere. It looked like a moon seen through a haze. “So it does have a companion.”
“Yes, it would seem so.”
IT WASN’T A planet. The thing was a brown dwarf, a star not massive enough to light up. “It’s about eight times as massive as Jupiter,” said Phyl.
“Anything else in the system?”
“Not as far as I can see.”
Hutch took them in closer. Angled them so they were able to look down on the accretion disk. It was a swirl of dazzling colors, of scarlet and gold and white. The ring was twisted and bent, an enormous tumbling river, dragged this way and that by the immense tidal effects, simultaneously brilliant and dark as if the rules of physics shifted and melted in the flow.
Antonio sat beside her, his notebook in his lap. “No way to describe
it,” he said.
A light mist was being sucked off the surface of the brown dwarf. It spiraled out into the sky, a cosmic corkscrew, aimed at the black hole, until it connected with the accretion disk.
“It’s feeding the accretion disk,” said Antonio. “That’s what lights it up. If the brown dwarf weren’t there, there’d be no accretion disk.”
“And we wouldn’t be able to see the hole,” said Hutch.
“That’s correct.”
“It’d be kind of dangerous, navigating through here,” she said.
“I’d say so.”
The dwarf writhed like a living creature. “How long will this process take?” Hutch asked. “Before the dwarf collapses and the lights go out?”
“Difficult to estimate. Probably millions of years.”
Hutch was thinking about the physics associated with black holes, how light freezes along the accretion disk, how time runs at a different pace close to the hole, how there’s really nothing there yet it still has enormous mass. There’d been talk in recent years that it might be possible to use antigrav technology to send a probe into a black hole. Rudy had thought it was impossible, that any conceivable technology would be overwhelmed. “How big’s the hole?” she asked.
“Probably not more than a few kilometers.”
Strange. The accretion disk was the most impressive physical object she’d ever seen, majestic, beautiful, overwhelming. Yet she couldn’t see what produced it.
“Hutch,” said Phyl, “the McAdams is in the area.”
THEY RENDEZVOUSED A few hours later. The ships had pulled back well away from the barrage of radiation, and the accretion disk was now only a glimmer in the night.
Hutch and Antonio took the lander over, and, glad for one another’s company, they settled into the common room. Mostly it was small talk, the long ride from Sigma 2711, how it was the end of January and where had the year gone? The latter remark, made by Antonio, had been intended as a joke. It fell flat, but Jon pointed out that Antonio was spending all his time with a beautiful woman, and the next time they tried something like this they should think things out more carefully.
They were looking at telescopic views when Phyl appeared, dark hair this time, dark penetrating eyes, wearing a lab coat, in her science director mode. The room went quiet.
She addressed herself to Hutch. “There’s something odd about the brown dwarf.”
“How do you mean?”
“It has too much deuterium.”
Hutch shrugged. Even Dr. Science looked amused. It was hardly a problem.
Phyl persisted. “It should not exist.”
“Explain, please.”
“Brown dwarfs are normally composed of hydrogen, helium, lithium, and assorted other elements. One of the other elements is deuterium.”
“Okay.”
“Deuterium is a heavy isotope of hydrogen, with one proton and one neutron. It was manufactured during the first three minutes of the Big Bang, and after that production got shut down. You don’t get any more by natural processes. Only small quantities were made initially. So there’s not much of it around. No matter where you look.”
“And this one has too much?” It still didn’t sound like a major issue.
“Yes.”
“What’s normal?”
“Only .001 percent. A wisp. A trace. A hint.”
“And how much does this one have?”
“Half—fifty percent. Well, forty-nine percent actually. But the point is there’s way too much. It’s impossible.”
“I can’t see that it’s a problem for us. Just log it, and we’ll let somebody else crunch the numbers and figure it out.”
“You don’t understand, Hutch.”
“I understand we have an anomaly.”
“No. What you have is an artificial object.”
Hutch wondered if Phyl had blown her programming. “You said it’s eight times the size of Jupiter.”
“Eight times the density.”
“That hardly matters. An object that big could not—”
“Hutch, don’t you see what’s happening here?”
“Not really. No.” She’d felt a lot of pressure since the loss of Rudy. And maybe she wasn’t thinking clearly, but she resented being taken to task by an AI.
“I think I do,” said Jon, who’d been sitting quietly, sipping hot chocolate. “Hutch, anything less than thirteen Jupiter masses is classified as a planet—” He turned to Antonio. “Do I have that right, Antonio?”
“Yes, Jon.”
“Because it never develops sufficient internal pressure to ignite its deuterium, let alone its hydrogen.”
“My God,” said Antonio. “Yet here’s an object eight times Jupiter’s mass. It displays surface abundances that can only come from deuterium burning. That’s impossible with 1/1000th of a percent deuterium. But deuterium ignition works perfectly if the object is born with eight Jupiter masses and fifty percent hydrogen and fifty percent deuterium. All it needs is a spark.”
“Wait a minute,” said Matt. “Would somebody please do this in English? For the slow kids?”
Jon and Antonio stared at one another. Both looked stunned. Jon was rubbing his forehead. “Think of a trace of air,” he said. “Mix it with gasoline and it’s stable. But a mixture of fifty percent gasoline and fifty percent air is highly combustible. A spark is all you need.”
“So where are we?” asked Hutch.
“Hutch,” said Antonio. “Nature can’t make, or ignite, fifty-fifty deuterium-hydrogen objects. So something else must have done it.”
“But why?” asked Matt. “Why would—?” He stopped cold.
“It’s a traffic sign,” said Hutch. “Without the dwarf—”
“Exactly right.” Antonio clapped his hands. “We said it coming in. Without the dwarf, the black hole would be invisible. Somebody just passing through, who doesn’t know in advance it’s there, could get gobbled up.”
“So,” said Matt, “who put it here? Who’d be capable of an engineering operation like that?”
“THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE that might interest you,” Phyl said later, when they were getting ready to start on the last leg of the voyage. Antonio had been reading. Hutch was absorbed with a checklist. Only Antonio looked up. “Yeah, Phyl,” he said. “What have you got?”
“I’ve been searching for hydrogen-deuterium brown dwarfs.”
“And?”
“There’s nothing in the scientific literature. Nobody’s ever seen one.”
“Okay.”
“But there’s a fictitious character, Kristi Lang, who showed up in some books written during the early twenty-first century. She’s an astrophysicist, and she locates some brown dwarfs exactly like this one. She eventually produces evidence to indicate that somebody is marking solitary black holes, exactly the way this one is marked. They each get a lighthouse. Because they’re the dangerous ones.”
“So who makes the lighthouses?”
“She has no way of knowing. She doesn’t even have a superluminal at her disposal.”
“How about that?” said Antonio. “I guess she called it.”
“Not really.” Hutch pushed away from the display that had absorbed her. “This isn’t the first black hole we’ve looked at. The Academy’s been to three. The Europeans have visited two. Nobody’s ever reported anything like this before.”
“The others,” said Phyl, “all had natural companions. You could see them from far away. This one, though, if you didn’t know in advance it was there, would be an ambush.”
ANTONIO’S NOTES
Hutch told us a story tonight, how, when she was first starting her career, she’d taken a research party to Iapetus to see the statue left there thousands of years ago by the Monument-Makers. How they’d found the tracks of the creature who’d made the statue, and how they matched with the statue so they knew it was a self-portrait. She talked about following the tracks onto a ridge, where she could see the creature had stood and st
ared at Saturn. And she thought how alone it had been, how big and cold and uncaring the universe was. Melville’s universe. You get in the way of the whale, you’re dead. And she says she thought how intelligent creatures, facing that kind of empty enormity, are in it together. She says she felt the same way today, looking at the brown dwarf. The lighthouse.
—Monday, January 28
PART FOUR
mordecai zone
chapter 32
THE OMEGA CLOUDS seemed to originate from a single source, located approximately fifty-seven light-years from the galactic center and in orbit around it. It was the Mordecai Zone, named for the guy who’d done the math twenty years ago. It also had a numerical designator, RVP66119. The more sensational news media commonly referred to it as the Boiler Room. Whatever one chose to call it, no one had ever seen it. The area was obscured by enormous clouds of dust and hydrogen.
The jump from Tenareif would take them across seven thousand light-years, and require nearly four weeks.
Jon was annoyed. For him, Tenareif was to have been the highlight of the mission. But Rudy’s death had cast a pall over everything, which even the discovery of the mysterious marker, with its implication of cosmic goodwill, had failed to lift. Especially for Matt. In the end, Jon understood, Matt had looked into the black hole and seen a metaphor for the meaning of existence.
CONDITIONS WERE NOT helped by the fact that riding his star drive was something less than exhilarating. Jon had always enjoyed travel. He’d been around the globe several times, had represented Henry Barber at distant forums and conferences whenever he could, had learned to sail when he was a boy, and had always known that one day he would go the Moon.
To the Moon.
But travel should include motion. Movement. The sense of getting from one place to another. Journeys are not about destinations, they are about the route. They are about mountain passages and cruising around the horn and riding the Northwest glide train along the Pacific rim. They are about sailing past Jupiter and drinking toasts as Centaurus grows brighter on the screens. (Okay, that last was strictly his imagination, but that made it no less true.) It was not, most certainly not, sitting for weeks inside a constricted container that passed nothing. That didn’t rock in the wind, or throw on the brakes, or even glide slowly through the eternal mists of Hazeltine space.
Cauldron Page 30
