It was early February back home. The All-Swiss Regional Bridge Tournament, in which he’d played last year, where he and his partner had almost won, had opened its qualifying round the day they’d left Tenareif. Pitchers would be reporting for spring training. And the streets of Washington would be filled with lovely young women.
There was a time he’d taken all that for granted.
He’d given up all pretense of trying to work. Before coming, he’d thought the atmosphere for finding ways to improve the Locarno, to make it more efficient, to give it more range on less fuel, to make it even more precise, would be ideal. But it hadn’t played out that way. For one thing he’d found it hard to work when there was no break, no chance to wander off and hit a local bistro. For another, as the situation on board deteriorated, he couldn’t simply abandon Matt, leaving him to entertain himself through the endless days and nights. So they watched VR and played bridge and worked out, and the lights dimmed and brightened, marking the hours.
The AI had an extensive translation by then of the Sigma Hotel poems, but neither of them was much into poetry. When Jim announced he could find nothing in the book about automated deep-space missions or about omega clouds, they lost interest. There were, Jim said, occasional references to clouds, as in creating moody skies or bringing rain, but there was nothing about clouds that rolled in from the outer darkness, pouring down the wrath of the gods on baffled city dwellers.
Jon spent a fair amount of time going over the details they’d compiled on Tenareif. He wasn’t an astrophysicist, and black holes were a long way from his field of interest, but nevertheless he spent hours peering down into the funnel, wondering what conditions were really like, what the odds were that the thing actually opened into another universe. Such a possibility was counterintuitive, but everything about black holes was counterintuitive. So much about the structure of the universe at large was counterintuitive.
HE AMUSED HIMSELF by calculating the distance to Earth. Technically, of course, while it was in Barber space, there was no such thing as a range between the McAdams and anything in the Milky Way. Each existed in its own spatial continuum. Nevertheless, he proposed the question to himself in terms of where they would be if they exited now.
At the beginning of the second week, they were twenty-two thousand light-years out. “Pity we don’t have a telescope big enough to look back,” he told Matt. “Imagine what we’d see. They won’t build their first pyramid for another fifteen thousand years or so. Babylon, Sumer, none of that exists. There’s nobody there except guys living in caves.”
Matt had been paging through his notebook. “It’s a bit like riding a time machine.”
“As close as we’ll get.”
JIM WAS INVALUABLE. He was always ready to play bridge or produce a show. Matt especially enjoyed Government Issue, which portrayed the misadventures of three female interns in a hopelessly corrupt and incompetent Washington. Jon had seen it before, a few episodes, but he grew to enjoy it more than anything else they watched, not because of the assorted buffooneries, or even because of the nubile young women. It was rather because, for reasons he could not understand, it didn’t seem quite so far as everything else.
So the weeks passed, and the final days dwindled away. And at last they were ready to make their jump into the Mordecai Zone. Matt sealed the viewports and the hatches against the radiation and told him they had three minutes.
LIBRARY ENTRY
We range the day
And mount the sun.
We soar past the rim of the world,
And know not caution nor fear.
But too soon the night comes.
—Sigma Hotel Book
chapter 33
TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND LIGHT-YEARS from Earth.
Jon was looking at the navigation screen when they made the jump. He had become accustomed to the mild tingling sensation in his toes and fingertips when the ship moved from one state to the other. He felt it now and started breathing again when the stars blinked on. They provided a spectacular light show, as always, and it appeared as suddenly as if someone had thrown a switch.
The night was ablaze, with stars that were points of light and others so close he could make out disks. Still others were radiant smears, trapped in clouds of gas and dust. Brilliant jets and light-years-long streaks of glowing gas arced across the sky. In their immediate rear lay a cloud filled with hot red stars. If you lived here, on a terrestrial world, it would never get dark. He decided at that moment on the title of his autobiography: 28,000 Light-Years from Earth. Except that twenty-eight didn’t work. Round it off. Make it thirty. 30,000 Light-Years from Earth: The Jon Silvestri Story. Yeah. He liked that. It had a ring to it.
They sealed the viewports, so the only external views now were by way of the displays.
Matt had been worried about jumping in so close. “It’s too goddam much,” he’d said before punching the button. Jon had felt the same way, too much radiation here. Despite the assurances of the people who’d put on the shielding, he wasn’t comfortable. The estimates regarding how much protection they needed had been just that: estimates. They’d built in a 50 percent safety factor, but out here that might not mean much. A sudden explosion somewhere, a flare, almost any kind of eruption might fry them before they knew they were in trouble.
“Jim.” Matt didn’t even bother to release his restraints. “How do the radiation levels look?”
“Shielding is adequate.”
“Good. Recharge.”
“Commencing.”
Matt wanted to be ready to clear out if necessary.
“Which way’s the core?” asked Jon.
A cursor appeared on-screen, marking the position of the McAdams. And an arrow: “Approximately sixty light-years. That way.” Into the swirl of dust and stars.
“Do you see any unusual activity out there, Jim?” Specifically, were there any omegas?
“Negative,” said Jim. “It is a crowded area, but I see nothing we need be concerned about.”
Jon took a deep breath. “We’re really here,” he said. Only sixty light-years from Sag A*. The monster at the heart of the galaxy. A black hole three million times as massive as the sun. Dead ahead.
Sixty light-years seemed suddenly close. Just up in the next block.
“The diameter of the Sag A* event horizon,” said Jim, “is estimated at 7.7 million kilometers.”
Matt took a deep breath. Shook his head. “You know, Jon, I’d love to get close enough to see it.”
“We wouldn’t survive, Matt.”
“I know.”
Nevertheless, it was something Jon would have liked to see. “Sounds like a project for an AI flight.”
They both glanced toward the AI’s mode lamp. It brightened. “Don’t expect me to volunteer,” Jim said.
Matt grinned. “Jim, I’m disappointed in you.”
“I’ll try to live with your disappointment, Matthew. The area is lethal. Jets, radiation, antimatter, gamma rays. Get close in, and the interstellar medium is filled with highly ionized iron. Not a place for anyone to travel. Especially not an advanced entity.”
Matt could not take his eyes from the screen. “It doesn’t look like a real sky out there,” he said. “It’s too crowded.”
“Yes.” It was a sight that left Jon breathless. Blue-white suns off to one side; in another direction, a cloud filled with stars probably just being born. Another cloud with jagged flashes, seemingly frozen, until he saw that they were moving, crawling through the cloud at light speed.
They could see hundreds of clouds, large and small, scattered across an area several light-years deep and about thirty light-years wide. They were elongated, tubular, accusing fingers pointed at the central black hole that held them locked in their orbits.
JON USED THE VR capabilities of the common room to re-create the clouds, and he spent the next few hours seated in his chair, wandering among them. He’d never considered himself one of those sense-of-wonder types, i
diots whose jaws dropped at the sight of a waterfall or a passing comet. But this was different. The sheer power and enormity of the Mordecai took his breath away. He was adrift near a luminous fountain when Matt broke in to tell him they’d located the Preston.
“You okay?” asked Hutch, referring to whether the shields were holding.
Both ships were, fortunately, doing well.
“I have some news,” she said. “We’ve spotted three omegas.”
The Mordecai Zone was an area of indefinite size. Their only real hope of finding the source had been to locate some omegas and run the vectors backward. That raised the issue of how common omegas were. Nobody had any real idea. Estimates ranged from a staggered production rate of fifty or so per year, to several thousand. But it was all guesswork.
Jon took a last look at the fountain, a golden stream arching through the night, bending and swirling as if the quality of light itself were different here. Then he shut it down and went onto the bridge. “Hi, Hutch,” he said, “welcome to the Cauldron.”
“Hello, Jon. Must be heaven out there for a physicist.”
“What do the omegas look like?”
“Unfortunately, they’re running together. All going in the same direction. Sorry.”
A couple of omegas on different routes would have allowed them to track backward until they intersected. And there, voilà, they would find the factory. The boiler room. The manufacturer. Whatever the hell it was.
“They’re in a vee-shape,” Hutch continued, “one in front, the others angled back at about twenty degrees. The entire formation is two and a fraction light-years across. The two trailing clouds are identical ranges from the lead.”
She relayed images, and Jim put them on-screen. They simply looked like hazy stars.
“They do love their math,” said Jon.
“They’re moving at escape velocity, in the same general direction as everything else here.”
Matt tried to get a clearer picture. “Can you give us a better mag?” he said.
“That’s max. We could go over and look at them, I suppose. But I don’t see the point.”
“Are we sure they’re omegas?”
“Yes. We’ve got matching spectra.”
A cursor appeared behind the one in the center. It tracked backward across open space, passed through a series of clouds, and finally vanished in the general chaos. “It originated somewhere along there,” said Hutch. “It can’t go too much deeper.”
“Why not?” asked Matt.
“The numbers don’t work. Whatever we’re looking for, it’s no further than about fifty-seven light-years from the core. That’s where we are now.”
“So the source is somewhere along this arc?”
“Yes. I’d say so.”
“How long’s the arc?”
“Five and a half light-years.”
“That could take a while.”
“Not necessarily. Most of the area’s open space.”
“Okay,” said Matt. “How do we want to do this?”
“Stay together,” she said. “We simply start poking around. Look for more omegas. Or anything else out of the way.”
“How do we inspect a dust cloud?” asked Jon.
“Scanners.”
“But some of these things are millions of kilometers deep. You’re not going to be able to see very far into that.”
“It’s all we have, Jon. Other than going in with the ships to see whether we bump into something.”
“Okay. I see what you mean.”
“Look, I can’t give you any specifics about this. We’ll be hunting for anything out of the ordinary. Unusual energy signatures. Artificial radio transmissions. Too much carbon. I don’t know—”
Matt nodded. “We’ll know it when we see it.”
“That’s exactly right, Matthew.”
“Okay, Preston, let’s go look at some dust clouds.”
THEIR FIRST TARGET was about forty million klicks long, maybe a million across. The dust was less concentrated than it appeared from a distance, and the sensors were able to penetrate it quite easily. “Dust and rocks all the way through,” said Matt.
The Preston lay off at a safe distance while the McAdams went in close, within a few kilometers, and, in effect, took the cloud’s temperature. Jim reported that conditions inside, so far as the initial readings were concerned, showed results well within anticipated parameters. No anomalies.
They moved along the face of the cloud for about an hour, recharged the Locarno, jumped twelve million kilometers, and repeated the process.
“Within anticipated parameters,” said Jim.
They moved to the next cloud, this time with the Preston doing the honors while Matt and Jon watched.
JON SILVESTRI’S NOTEBOOK
The individual clouds are spectacular. Having to watch them on a display doesn’t do them justice. I wish it were possible to stick my head out the door and look at this thing, really look at it. In this close, I suspect it would appear like a wall across the universe.
—Monday, March 10
chapter 34
THEY NAMED THE clouds alphabetically as they progressed. The first one was Aggie, supposedly a morose aunt of Matt’s. The second was Bill, who had been a grouchy editor early in Antonio’s career.
They went to a round-the-clock search pattern, with one of the two pilots awake at all times. They stayed outside the clouds, one vehicle close in, the one with the functioning pilot, and the other at a respectful distance.
Hutch admitted to Antonio that she could not imagine how any directed operation could function out here. The place was indeed a cosmic cookpot, a cauldron of churning clouds and enormous jets. She suspected stellar collisions were not uncommon.
Toward the end of the second week, while they were completing their search of Charlotte, Phyl announced that she had sighted another group of omegas. Four this time.
They glittered like distant fires, flaring and dimming in the shifting light of the Cauldron.
“They track to Cloud F,” she said.
F for Frank.
Frank was a cloud of moderate size. Like all the others, it was long and narrow, aimed toward Sag A* by the relentless gravity. They passed a stellar corpse on approach. And several red stars.
“Length of the cloud,” said Phyl, “is eighty billion kilometers.” Almost seven times the diameter of the solar system. Like everything else at this range from Sag A*, it was orbiting the core at about 220 kps. Frank would need about 480,000 years to complete an orbit.
It was the Preston’s turn to go in close and look. But they changed the routine: Both pilots would remain awake during the search. At the end of the day, they’d simply call it off and start fresh in the morning.
Antonio watched nervously as Hutch took station about eighty kilometers out from the edge of the cloud. Matt retreated to six million klicks.
“We safe at this range?” asked Antonio.
“Probably not,” she said.
The cloud had become a vast, amorphous wall. It extended above and below the ship, fore and aft on the starboard side, to the limits of vision. It was alive with energy, riven near the surface by enormous lightning bolts, illuminated deep within by flashes and glimmerings.
Antonio knew the history, had read of that first encounter with an omega, when Hutchins and a few others at a place they called Delta had been attacked by lightning bolts, had tried to ride a lander to safety while directed lightning rained down out of the sky. He was impressed that she would tempt fate again.
Two red jets arced through the night, brightening the face of the cloud. “It’s probably a pulsar,” Antonio said. “This area must be littered with burned-out supernovas.”
Hutch had been unusually quiet. They were both on the bridge, belted down in case they had to leave in a hurry. She was checking something off in a notebook and simultaneously watching as the insubstantial wall rippled past. “Hutch,” he said, “answer a question.”
&nb
sp; “If I can.”
“You’re disappointed, aren’t you? All this way, and there’s not really going to be anything we can do here. Even if this cloud really is the source, it’s just too big.”
She adjusted course, pulling a little closer. A sudden flash dazzled them. “We don’t know that yet,” she said. “To be honest, Antonio, I’m not entirely sure I want to meet whatever’s putting the omegas in play. I’m perfectly willing to let somebody else have that honor.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
Her eyes looked far away. “This feels like the start of a new phase. I mean, the Locarno Drive and the possibilities it opens.”
“And—?”
Her eyes drifted back to the screen. The wall had gone dark. “I’d like to shut them down.” She realized how unrealistic that was, and shrugged. “The truth, Antonio, is that I never believed in this part of the operation. I went along with it because it was what Rudy wanted to do. And maybe he was right. At least we’ve come out here. Now we can shake our fist at them, I guess, and go home.”
It was Antonio’s turn to fall silent. He was thinking that if he could go back and make a few changes in his life, he’d do some things differently. He wasn’t sure what. He knew he could never have done the things she had. He couldn’t seriously imagine himself at the controls of a superluminal. Wouldn’t have wanted to make some of the life-and-death decisions she’d been forced to make. He’d been Dr. Science. A pretend astrophysicist. And he’d covered scientific developments for several news organizations. It hadn’t been a bad career, really. He’d been a minor celebrity, he’d been paid reasonably well, and he liked to think he’d been responsible for turning some kids on to scientific careers.
But he wasn’t really going anywhere. When his time came to retire, when he’d pulled the pin and gone back home, no one would ever remember him. Maybe they’d remember Dr. Science. But not Antonio Giannotti.
Cauldron Page 31
