Turn Right At Orion

by Mitchell Begelman

  Table of Contents

  OTHER BOOKS BY MITCHELL BEGELMAN

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part One - GRAVITY

  Chapter 1 - To the Center of the Milky Way?

  Chapter 2 - En Route

  Chapter 3 - A Ballet

  Chapter 4 - Ground Zero

  Part Two - MOTION

  Chapter 5 - The Cannibal

  Chapter 6 - Black Hole with a Mission

  Chapter 7 - SS 433

  Part Three - EQUILIBRIUM

  Chapter 8 - Shangri-La

  Chapter 9 - The Soft-Shell Crab

  Chapter 10 - Crab II

  Chapter 11 - Strange Light

  Chapter 12 - The Ends of Equilibrium

  Part Four - BIRTH

  Chapter 13 - Orion

  Chapter 14 - By the Back Door

  Chapter 15 - Trapezium

  Chapter 16 - Points of Darkness Shafts of Light

  Chapter 17 - The Dust Storm

  Chapter 18 - The Shepherd

  Chapter 19 - Finishing Touches

  Chapter 20 - Virgin Worlds

  Part Five - EVOLUTION

  Chapter 21 - The Blob

  Chapter 22 - Divining the Interior

  Chapter 23 - Nuclear Alchemy

  Chapter 24 - The Dumbbell

  Chapter 25 - Leaving Home

  Chapter 26 - Outposts in the Halo

  Chapter 27 - The Explosion

  Chapter 28 - Aftermath

  Chapter 29 - Afterthought

  Part Six - HIERARCHY

  Chapter 30 - Really Leaving Home

  Chapter 31 - A City of Galaxies

  Chapter 32 - Brobdingnag

  Chapter 33 - Reprise

  Chapter 34 - On the Brink

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Index

  Copyright Page

  OTHER BOOKS BY MITCHELL BEGELMAN

  Gravity’s Fatal Attraction (with Sir Martin Rees)

  To my parents

  INTRODUCTION

  Translator’s Note

  I came across the following memoir under distressing circumstances: at an auction of surplus documents to raise funds for a new storage wing at the Global Library. The thought of this valuable information being sold to the highest bidder is appalling, but such are the times we live in. The author appears to come from a well-studied planet in a galaxy about 60 million light-years away, known to its erstwhile occupants as “Earth.” If we are correct in our attribution, he belongs to a civilization that warrants more than a passing mention in our Core Curriculum because of the early and curious way in which its technology developed. What appears to clinch the identification is the author’s reference, in the very first paragraph, to a scientist known (in his language) as Kepler. Of course, information on this pivotal figure was eventually disseminated cosmos-wide in Earth’s copious (though brief) transmissions, but the subtle “ownership” expressed by the author suggests that he and Kepler have common cultural origins. There are also linguistic clues, turns of phrase that seldom show up in adaptations of Earth’s language by neighboring civilizations. Fortunately, our records of their transmissions have enabled us to produce what we feel must be an accurate reconstruction of their language; this forms the basis for my translation.

  Several things are remarkable about this document. The author’s mixture of experiential metaphor with scientific theory is highly unusual; most records we possess of Earth’s achievements in astrophysics indicate a greater detachment on the part of the observer. The science is generally of high quality, with understandable lapses. Notably, there are significant gaps in the author’s comprehension of what causes stars to explode, his grasp of pulsar physics leaves much to be desired, and his interpretation of how jets of plasma escape from the vicinity of black holes is sketchy at best. But the glimpses we are granted into this exotic being’s direct responses to cosmic phenomena more than compensate for these quibbles. Although the narrator seems curiously reserved—perhaps because of his separation from his home planet—the emotional reactions he does express are strikingly similar to those recorded by our own early explorers. We are swept up in his compulsion, even though the initial reasons for his journey (and his journal) are never satisfactorily explained. Solitary space travel has never been the norm in our culture, and we are at a loss to interpret the list of reasons given. Do we take them at face value? Or is the author unwilling or unable to divulge his real motivations? Is he, perhaps, an exile from his home planet? Or a scout, for a planned mission of colonization or emigration, who has “gone native”?

  Whatever his motivations, the narrator displays an admirable command of technology. He recognizes that the only effective method of space travel involves motion at very close to the speed of light. He is adept at manipulating this motion to maintain the structural integrity of both his craft and himself, even when he finds he has misjudged the harsh conditions of space. We find frequent evidence of his resourcefulness, such as his use of hibernation to circumvent the limitations imposed by his species’s brief life span.

  In Turn Right at Orion, we are treated to a journey of great scope, far longer than initially planned, and are privy to the narrator’s discoveries and dilemmas as he travels farther and farther afield. In fact, some passages (descriptions of the jet and extended galactic halo, in particular) actually suggest that he was in the center of our galaxy when he transmitted this memoir.

  The title of the memoir was chosen by its author and is somewhat problematical. We understand that “Orion” refers to a region of vigorous star and planet formation—long since dissipated—that was located about 1500 light-years from the author’s home planet at the time of his departure. The author’s visit to this region, recounted in the lengthy fourth section of the memoir, clearly made a strong impression on him. I regard it as the turning point in his story. But we have absolutely no idea what is meant here by the phrase turn right; such a phrase makes little sense in the context of cosmic navigation. We can only surmise that it is a colloquialism or an obscure cultural reference.

  Whereas in more prosperous (and enlightened) times the publication of such a document without exhaustive footnotes and a gloss would have been unthinkable, there is little support for such scholarly effort today. However, to discover and rescue such a prize and not to share it, in whatever form, would seem an even greater outrage. I offer my translation of this manuscript unadorned. Make of it what you will.

  Prologue

  If I have one complaint about the center of the Milky Way, it is that I found it nearly impossible to get a decent night’s sleep. The sky teemed with blue-white stars, each as brilliant as a full moon. There must have been thousands of them, and I, sensitive to light as I am, felt pinned from all sides by their radiance. It made no difference that the portals of my craft could easily be covered to block out the glare; the knowledge that I was bathed in the light of this enormous star cluster was enough to keep me awake. Had I been able to sleep, I might have managed to convince myself that this long voyage was an entertaining dream, my answer to Johannes Kepler’s Somnium. That great astronomer’s allegorical excursion to the Moon, circa 1611, had been a favorite of mine as a student—I once translated it from the Latin myself—and since then I have often wondered what subliminal role it played in triggering my wanderlust. But this was no dream. The sensations were too acute and the discomfort too real to be so easily dismissed as imaginary.

  It’s funny how I dwell on the memories of such small annoyances nearly as often as I mull over the great themes that have emerged during my travels. In my mind I will always be able to revisit the searing, metallic glare that confronted me near the Crab Nebula’s p
ulsar; the infuriating, impenetrable shroud of dust that blocked my explorations of the giant star Betelgeuse; the seasickness that overtook me as I surfed through heavy turbulence to the nucleus of the galaxy from which I now write. The grander episodes have been internalized, I suppose, and no longer serve to mark the specific events of this journey so much as to characterize my own progress as its witness. Among these episodes were the life-and-death encounters: a terrifying incident near the second black hole I visited, my escape from a supernova explosion in the Magellanic Clouds, the barrage of rogue boulders that nearly destroyed my craft as I tried to watch the creation of a planet. These dramas, any of which could have cost me dearly, I seem to have taken in stride. Each has helped to crystallize an aspect of this journey—to broaden my appreciation of relationship among phenomena that I scarcely imagined could be connected in so many ways.

  Funny, too, that a few periods of enforced wakefulness should have disturbed me. After all, 85 percent of my journey has been spent in hibernation—a necessity, given the journey’s length. I have been traveling, now, for more than 200 years by my clock. I am—or was—an astrophysicist of the early twenty-first century. I think back on that time frequently, and it is only with the greatest difficulty that I can accept the fact that (almost certainly) every last one of my colleagues has been dead for 60 million years! This trip has occupied less than half of my conscious lifetime, and part of my psyche cannot grasp the passage of so much time on Earth.

  Yet there is nothing paradoxical about the distortions of time that I have had to create in order to make this trip. Because my craft has accelerated to within a hair’s breadth of the speed of light (without ever exceeding it), small amounts of time pass for me while eons elapse for Earth and most other bodies in the cosmos. I am a manipulator of time, though I am doing nothing that is not readily comprehensible to every physics student on my planet.

  Nor are the other technical aspects of my craft anything more than extensions of the technology that existed at the time of my departure. True, I pioneered the experiments that led to this highly efficient form of propulsion, and I was the first to build a prototype. But by the spaceship design standards of my time, my craft boasts few extravagances. No one would have called this a cathedral to space travel; it is certainly no space-metropolis. Why should it be, given that I am its only inhabitant? My craft is cozy but not cramped. I have grown into it. I have lived here so long that I have come to think of it as an extension of myself, just as a hermit crab must come to regard its adopted shell. I’m organized but not especially tidy; fragments of my writings and calculations are strewn about. And I have set several view screens to project images that please me—reminders both of Earth and of places I have encountered on my odyssey. In a word, my craft is home.

  This vessel has flawlessly provided the necessities of life for all my waking years aboard. Food and air have never posed a problem. I have modest stores, I recycle waste, and whatever else I need I synthesize from the material of space. The fuel scoops, which can be extended out to thousands of kilometers from my living quarters, sweep through a kilogram of interstellar matter per second of Earth time (far more per second of time as measured by my clocks). Most of this matter is hydrogen or helium, and it is instantly converted into energy for propulsion. A small fraction—about 1 percent—consists of oxygen, carbon, and all the other elements. Of this, only a tiny amount needs to be diverted for conversion into food or air or for the fabrication of any other materials I require (such as tools, paper, and patches for my craft’s skin).

  My craft is sturdy, too—I have survived, after all, and am in reasonable health—though it is perhaps not quite so sturdy as I should have liked. I have subjected it to conditions it was never meant to endure and have watched, horrified, as its outer layers began to boil and slough off under the intense pressures of an onrushing nebula. But the shielding has always held. Because it has protected me time after time, I have begun to develop the kind of affinity for it that comes with shared adversity—as though it were a traveling companion.

  Does my craft have a name? I had never thought to name it—such a symbol of personification seemed unnecessary, But how about Rocinante? The name has some sentimental value for me. One of my graduate students gave this label to my research group’s first computer. I immediately recalled John Steinbeck’s motorhome in “travels with Charley,” but it turned out that she had named it after the spaceship in a rock group’s popular song. My faculty colleagues assumed we had named it after Don Quixote’s horse and proceeded to call the department’s successive computers Dulcinea, Panza, and so on. Personally, I have always leaned toward the Steinbeck association, and I think it also suits my craft. Rocinante is homey in a rough sort of way, like a camper van. An old camper van, for that matter, with its fraying upholstery. In lieu of human companionship (always pragmatic, I have long since trained myself to cease regretting its absence), my craft at least provides the companionship of a stable, human-scaled environment that I have shaped, It is necessary armor against a. cosmos that does not know I exist.

  I see no reason to rehearse in too great detail the events that led up to this trip and have now receded so far into the past. I was motivated by several considerations. First, I traveled because I could. The craft was ready, and I grew impatient waiting for the formal cycle of testing and refinement that would have extended (I feared) far beyond my lifetime. Then there were academic and political disputes—over my experiments and my theories, over priorities and precedents—that now seem so petty and incomprehensible that they do not bear repeating.

  The scientific and philosophical motivations remain much more vivid, although even they have evolved so far beyond recognition that it scarcely seems worthwhile to describe them exhaustively. A number of bizarre objects and phenomena had been the focus of my studies for several years. There were quasars, pulsars, jets, and black holes, to name a few of the more exotic ones. Were they all merely curiosities, or did their similarities, differences, and relationships convey some more subtle message about the way things are constructed and the way everything “works” out there? In what ways did they connect—if at all—with the “everyday” phenomena of the skies: the stars, galaxies, and nebulae with which I had long been familiar?

  My scholarly interests in these phenomena, and the questions they raised, gradually took on the character of an obsession. Then, the invention of a means to travel in the realm of these bodies made the prospect of some sort of trip irresistible. To gather firsthand evidence about them—that became the objective against which I would have to judge the success of my work, eclipsing the accolades that began to rain down on me as word of my propulsion experiments leaked out.

  I was enthralled with the idea of touching the places I studied, or coming as near to touching them as I could. For years I had endured the gloating of my colleagues in the field of planetary science. They had grown accustomed to visiting their objects of study—at least the local ones—and literally scooping up samples, if not in person, then through the agency of automated probes. We astrophysicists had always had to make do with remote viewing and indirect deductions based on highly idealized models for the phenomena we studied. A slight mistake in the observations, and we were easily fooled, as we were when we mistakenly attributed the pulsations of a nearby binary star to a quasar nearly coincident with it on the sky. To make any progress at all, we applied a “principle of mediocrity,” asserting that any type of phenomenon found nearby should be characteristic of the Universe at large. This principle often went under the more dignified name of the Copernican Principle (after the Polish astronomer who had the audacity to lump Earth in with the other planets, removing it from its Ptolemaic position at the center of the universe). To extend the Copernican Principle to physical laws was to assume that those laws applied equally everywhere in the Universe. A very healthy conservatism, I suppose, that usually stood us in good stead, but a philosophy that made it much more difficult for an astrophysicist to
discover a new law of nature.

  Even worse off were the poor cosmologists, who had only one “object” to study. At least we could compare different galaxies and nebulae, much as the planetary folk practiced “comparative planetology.” I often suspected that a kind of cosmic loneliness was the real reason why cosmologists were so apt to hypothesize parallel universes, “many worlds” theories, and the like. These alternative universes, patently undetectable, were like their imaginary friends.

  The idea of bringing to these studies even the slightest bit of immediacy, of direct sensation, became my crusade. Finally I hatched a concrete plan: to travel to the center of the Milky Way, to see what was there, and then to return. Why visit the Galaxy’s center? As best I can reconstruct it, I had fallen prey to a simplistic optimism about the root of all structures—a kind of cosmic Utopianism. I came to believe that the secret to the organization of the Universe could be summed up in a single word: gravity. Experience as pure a gravitational field as possible, and you will have had all the experience you need, I thought. At the time this seemed to make sense. Gravity was always attractive, unlike the forces that governed electricity and held sway inside atoms. And unlike these other kinds of forces, gravity did not falter (although it grew steadily weaker), no matter how large the distances involved. It held the Moon in orbit around the Earth, the Earth around the Sun, and the Sun around the Galaxy. The analogy went all the way up to the entire Universe, which actually could have recollapsed as a result of its own gravity, if only it had been sufficiently massive and had not flung itself apart so violently at the outset. Universal attraction seemed to be the key. Perhaps this is why, in a perverse and symbolic way, I welcomed the unpleasant sensation of being pinned inside the cockpit of my craft by the oppressive glare of the Galaxy’s central star cluster. The stark shafts of light, beating in on me from all sides, immobilized me, as though I had fallen under the influence of some immense gravitational field. In a sense, this was what I had been looking for, although I had expected to find it manifested in a physical rather than a psychological force.