‘They could as easily have been something like a coral or a slime mould,’ Dorthy said. Valdez’s uncharacteristic nervousness mixed with her own, a jittery instability like the high she used to get after drinking too much coffee. She added, ‘Or perhaps it was cybernetically controlled. We may never know.’
‘Oh, we’re going to find out,’ Jake Bonner said. He was grinning like an ape, his nose scant centimetres from the tank’s edge as he peered at its enigmatic images. ‘That’s why we came along, to root out the truth and to bring it home.’
For although Flores had chosen to abandon ship, the rest of the cabal had elected to stay, along with two or three other non-Witness scientists. In the three weeks of intensive data collection that followed translation of the Vingança through the wormhole, most of them seemed to be having the time of their lives, despite the arbitrary strictures that the Witnesses applied to their research.
Dorthy found a job monitoring probes that had skipped away through contraspace and were now falling through the accretion disc towards the black hole. She had become an astronomer again, and loved every minute. Valdez, though, had little to do but map the planetoid, and after discovery of the alien wreck the Witnesses would release only heavily-censored data to him. It was perhaps one reason why his relationship with Dorthy abruptly cooled…and he was afraid of her, too, or of what was in her head, and was too proud to admit it. Dorthy tried to reason with him, but they made love exactly twice after passage through the wormhole, and the last time Valdez was impotent, and of course he blamed Dorthy. She tried to smooth things over, telling him that they were all tired, and always on edge, but for him it was a matter of pride, of face, of machismo. He began to avoid her. They were all working such long hours that it wasn’t difficult.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered—not when so much else was at stake—if Dorthy had not discovered during one of the routine medical scans the Witnesses imposed on everyone that she was pregnant. ‘A full month, too,’ Dorthy told Ang Poh Mokhtar, who was the only person she felt able to confide in. ‘It must have happened the very first time we made love. I feel so stupid. I knew I was a couple of weeks late, but I put it down to the stress of our situation here. My shot wore off while I was being held by the Navy, and I didn’t really think about it afterwards. I suppose in the back of my mind I thought that Valdez had had a shot, too.’
Ang said, ‘A lot of Greater Brazilians don’t, let me tell you. They think it affects their virility. A woman has to be careful with them—they’re all loaded pistols.’
‘Well, I know that now. I feel so stupid, to be caught out by biology after all I’ve been through.’
‘What are you going to do, my dear? Apart from not telling Valdez.’
‘That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you. If I should tell him.’
‘If you have to ask me first, you don’t want to.’
Dorthy thought about that. ‘I suppose not. He’d just think I was trying to get my own back for his avoiding me.’
Ang said, ‘I’m just an ignorant Nepalese woman, and no mindreader. But you don’t seem too unhappy with the news.’
Dorthy thought about that, too. She said, ‘No, I suppose I’m not. I’m thirty-four, Ang, I’ve never really thought about having a child…but I’m not going to get rid of it. Not until I’ve thought about it some more, anyway.’
But there was little time for thought. There was too much to do. By default, the cabal of unaligned scientists had taken on the enormous task of mapping the black hole and its accretion disc. The Witnesses were busy with a structure hung some way around the edge of the accretion disc—and were frustratingly secretive about their findings, for Dorthy knew that if the marauders were anywhere, that was where they would be. But so far there had been no sign of them, and the structure was mostly obscured by the accretion disc itself, and no one in the cabal had seen much more than fuzzy low resolution holos of something that looked oddly like a gigantic version of the Vingança, some land of sphere with a spine or spike trailing behind it.
Dorthy, plugged day after day into the data streams of one or another of the probes that were falling through the apocalyptic spectacle of the accretion disc, had seen as much of the structure as any non-Witness aboard the Vingança. Inductance electrodes pasted to her eyelids fed data gathered by the drone directly to her visual centre. Plugged in, she soon forgot that she was sunk in the embrace of a couch in one of the science module’s monitoring cubicles. She was out there, indices of the probe’s dozen or so instruments constantly flickering at the edges of her vision as she fell through tides of stripped nuclei, through spiral storms of light.
Fed by a great arc of infalling material, the accretion disc seethed and crackled and flared with every kind of energy. The titanium foil which wrapped the probe was eroding so fast that Dorthy could almost feel it shredding as cosmic rays generated by collapsing nuclei punched millions of atom-sized holes every second; the indices of self-repairing circuits jittered and blurred as they made good damage inflicted at the quantum level on up to impacts with interstellar grains. There was so much radiation that a human in a p-suit would have lasted perhaps an hour before soaking up a lethal dose.
And above all else there was light, so much light, from far infra-red to X-rays generated by atoms smashed together in the constant seethe. Radiation and particle collision induced excitatory emissions in the tenuous gases: rippling banners and scarves and streamers—violet and red and indigo, green and gold and deepest purple—wound through the accretion disc’s general ultraviolet glow. There were solar-system-sized storms of electrical energy generated by friction. Remnants of stars torn apart by tides glowed like burning eyebrows. And gravitational fluxes were often so steep that they acted like fusion pinches, smelting stripped nuclei of hydrogen and helium into heavier elements in momentary microscopic super-novae that flickered through the accretion disc’s auroras like pinholes into the pure light of creation.
At the centre of everything was the black hole. Sagittarius A*, a frozen star forever falling into itself, the light of its vanishing trick forever trapped at its event horizon. Alpha and omega. It could not be seen except by the distortion it created in the accretion disc: an asymmetric blister of fierce radiation compressed around an object roughly ten million times the mass of Sol, with a theoretical diameter of thirty million kilometres and a virtual diameter that was incalculable because inside the singularity all laws broke down. The probe was only a light day from it now, but even at maximum magnification it was barely visible, a minute insignificant flaw in the accretion disc’s narrowing spirals, yet as pregnant with menace as a rogue carcinoma cell.
The mass of the black hole and the processes within its accretion disc were easily measured. In fact, the data Dorthy was helping to collect were merely refinements of what had been known for centuries, details which had hitherto been obscured by vast gas clouds which shrouded the galactic core from the spiral arm where Sol and the little bubble of known space were located. But what Dorthy wanted to learn about most of all was not inside the accretion disc but at its edge, a few dozen light days from the wormhole planetoid: the vast and mysterious hyperstructure the Witnesses had claimed as their own, surely a remnant of the Golden Age she’d glimpsed in her fugue down on Colcha.
The day that everything changed, Dorthy as usual set the probe’s rear camera to track the hyperstructure as soon as she plugged in. An inset a hundred or so pixels across overlaid one corner of the panorama of the accretion disc, showing the hyperstructure limned against the fuzzy cluster of hot Wolf-Rayet stars that were beginning to shine within the ragged torus of gas clouds. A shadow of a sphere with a spike trailing off behind it, a spike billions and billions of kilometres long but only an indistinct thread even using the drone’s onboard graphics enhancement chip. There was the hint of a ghostly twin of this huge relic some way around the edge of the accretion disc, but no more than a hint.
But there was no more time for simple observation. Ha
lf the probe’s instruments had already fallen silent, victims of radiation or impacts of stripped nuclei moving close to the speed of light. And now the downlink itself was breaking up. Rasters of interference flickered across Dorthy’s vision. A roar of white noise was building in her ears. With a measure of regret, Dorthy cut the link. The vast panorama of infalling spirals of light shuddered and folded in on itself. She was back on the couch, deep in the science module of the Vingança.
Dorthy sat up, dizzy with disorientation, and started to peel contacts from her eyelids, her temples, the nape of her neck. She felt a deep tender sadness for the loss of the poor faithful probe, but perhaps it was just as well. She had spent long enough simply observing. It was time to take stock, to analyse what was happening and what had happened, to sift through the billions of bits of data for any trace of the marauders.
But as usual, Professor Doctor Abel Gunasekra was ahead of everyone else. When Dorthy went to grab something to eat, she learnt that he’d called a meeting to discuss his findings. After three weeks, everything was about to change.
‘There can be no doubt,’ Gunasekra said at the end of his presentation, ‘but that the same process we observed after the Event, the asymmetric appearance of ultra-high energy photons decaying in cascades of leptons and hadrons, is happening within the accretion disc, but on a far vaster scale. We see the wavefront formation of stars following some recent cataclysm; and we see a shell of gas recently ejected from the accretion disc. It is my guess that those stars consist almost entirely of hydrogen produced from ultra-high energy photonic decay. Something is rubbing the fabric of space-time thin enough to allow creation to shine through. I will not speculate further, but perhaps we can draw our own conclusions as to what may be responsible, given the anomalous structure observed in the same region.’
Almost all of the scientists were there to listen to him: some thirty Witnesses and, in a defensive huddle in one corner, the dozen unaligned scientists who had chosen to stay on the Vingança after the mutiny. Talbeck Barlstilkin sat amongst them, eyes gazing at infinity. Gunasekra’s conclusions had proven too abstract, too far removed from ordinary human experience, to be of any use to him. Valdez was there, too; when Dorthy had taken her seat at the back of the room, the sight of him had torn at her all over again. There he was, quite oblivious of what he’d done to her, and yet she was no longer angry at him. Sooner or later she’d have to tell him, anyway. She was a small slightly-built woman, and in a few more weeks her pregnancy would start to show. And then Gunasekra had started to speak, and Dorthy had forgotten about everything else.
For even if it had bored Talbeck Barlstilkin, Gunasekra’s brief presentation had overwhelmed her…It was a bolt of pure intellectual electricity that overcame her exhaustion and the enervating buzz from too much coffee (she was going to have to cut down on coffee), overcame the mild claustrophobia caused by stale air and the unnatural glare of the glotubes and too many minds pressing on her own thoughts. Imagine! It was all far stranger than anything she had been told by the Alea on P’thrsn, strange and wonderful and exciting. The marauders had done more than simply expel the other Alea families and take over the core stars: they had subverted the process of creation itself.
In every other part of the Universe, the arrow of entropy pointed inexorably towards heat death, as irreplaceable hydrogen was smelted by units of four to heavier elements, all the way to iron, which would fuse no further. In aeons to come, the Universe would grow so cold that no organic life would be possible. There would be nothing left but black holes, black dwarf stars and wandering planets heated only by proton decay, everything an immeasurable fraction above absolute zero, a wolf-winter that would last until, after 1030 years, space-time would at last stop expanding and begin to fall back in on itself.
But not here, in the cradle of creation. Here, hydrogen was born from the light stolen from another continuum: and it was being made into stars. As the old order faded away, worlds circling these new suns would provide homes for the families of the marauders, worlds and stars without end until the Universe finally recollapsed into its singularity.
His speech over, Gunasekra bowed to his audience and sat at the table facing the gathering, beside the benevolently smiling white-haired leader of the Witnesses, Gregor Baptista. There was a rustle of excited whispers. Dorthy shared the common excitement, and could feel too Baptista’s sly amusement. He and a few of the other Witnesses shared the same secret, but her Talent was too blunted by counteragent to know what amused him. And besides, this was no time to play at being a Talent, a spy. She was so lost in speculation that she hardly heard the first few comments made by Witness scientists. But then Jake Bonner strode to the whiteboard. Even Talbeck Barlstilkin looked up, resting two fingers along the length of his scarred face.
‘I’ve an objection,’ Bonner said. ‘One that I think you may have overlooked, Abel, I’m afraid. If we assume that your postulated process is being used to replenish the Universe with hydrogen and extend the era of star-dominated processes indefinitely, then inevitably its temperature will be raised by photon production.’ He smeared a space on the whiteboard with a wet cloth. ‘If we assume that all the new hydrogen is eventually used up by stellar fusion processes, we can quite easily derive the accumulated number of starlight photons produced from N, the number of protons.’
In big clumsy script Bonner wrote an equation that for once was familiar to Dorthy, a compression of coincidental expressions for the number of stars, their average luminosity, lifetime and size:
10-3(Me/Mp) α6 αG - ½N ≈ 10N
‘Of course,’ Bonner said, ‘this is very much smaller than the number of primeval photons left over from the Big Bang, which is about a billion N, but the point is that starlight photons are about ten thousand times more energetic than the photons of the residual 3°K background. Contemporary accumulated starlight energy density is not very many orders of magnitude less than that contributed by the Big Bang, and increase in N, which is what you are proposing, Abel, will increase starlight photon output and increase the background temperature of the Universe.’
It was a direct derivation of Olbers’ paradox, Dorthy realized, the old problem of why, if the Universe were infinite, space was not filled with starlight, much as an observer in a vast forest would see nothing but tree-trunks in any direction. An infinite Universe would blaze with light, and everywhere would be at the temperature of the surface of a star. But the Universe was not infinite, of course, because it had a specific starting point. It was, quite simply, not old enough to have filled up with starlight. But the marauders were producing a new source of starlight, and extended production could overheat the Universe rather than simply ameliorate its cooling.
Bonner’s objection was fundamental and elegantly simple, and Professor Doctor Abel Gunasekra looked suitably abashed. But only for a moment. He wasn’t about to give up his cherished, newly-minted hypothesis without a fight. ‘I see the problem, of course,’ he said, ‘but photon accretion rate is surely too slow to have a significant effect. In order for space to reach the temperature of boiling water, for instance, the photon to proton ratio would have to be ten to the power two, not ten to the power nine, as it is now. Stellar photon production would have to take place over several Hubble lifetimes to even begin to approach that value. Long enough, surely, in this finite Universe of ours, for it not to be a problem.’
‘My point is that if the process we observe in the accretion disc were extended towards infinity,’ Bonner said, ‘the temperature would eventually reach the point where photon/lepton transformations can occur spontaneously, and we have returned to the conditions of the monobloc, but on the scale of a hundred billion or more light years. I think that we should consider whether significant effects could occur before T equals infinity.’
Dorthy saw that the two scientists were beginning to obscure the original debate in layers of complex argument and rebuttal, and perhaps Gregor Baptista did, too, for the leader of the Witnesses slowl
y got to his feet. Dorthy leaned forward in her pressed plastic chair. Despite Baptista’s lordly, calm air, she sensed something awry deep inside him, a widening flaw beneath the glaze of his careful mannerisms. Something was about to happen.
Baptista held his pose for a full minute without speaking, looking at the people in the room one by one. Dorthy boldly stared back at him, but his gaze had already moved past. At last he said, ‘I have listened carefully to everything you have had to say, most especially to you, Professor Doctor Gunasekra—’ he gravely nodded to Gunasekra, who simply smiled back—‘and it is clear to me that we are in the presence of processes beyond our comprehension.’
‘Hell no,’ Jake Bonner said from his corner by the whiteboard. ‘Just beyond our capabilities—for the moment, anyhow.’
Baptista ignored him. ‘We have to admit we are in the presence of those we could call gods, in the old sense of the word. World makers. Creators. Immortals. They are engaged in a feat of engineering which compared to the planoforming of a single world—and even that is at present beyond our capabilities—is as the pyramid of Cheops to an ants’ nest. It is clear to me that we cannot fight these gods, for the smallest gesture on their part would be instantly fatal to us. Instead, quite simply, we must petition them. We will announce our presence and then we will wait. We are not in a position to do any more.’
Dorthy said, ‘I think you’re wrong.’ People were looking around at her, hard appraising stares from the Witness scientists, interest from the neutral corner. She said, ‘There is nothing here to contradict the story I was given by the Alea on P’thrsn, except perhaps in scale. All we are seeing is the work of the marauder Alea family, using stolen technology, machines abandoned around the black hole by some other intelligent species.’
Baptista said silkily, ‘I do not see the point of your tale, Dr Yoshida, even if it can be verified. Does it really matter how these beings came to be what they most evidently are?’
Eternal Light Page 25
