Singularity
Page 11
What the hell. Dismissing the stray paranoid thought that this whole Metro episode was some elaborate KGB sting, Knox reached out and shook the extended hand.
“Jonathan Knox. Very pleased, Aleksandr Andreyevich.” Paranoia or not, it was best to keep the relationship at the arms-length formality that went along with the first-name-plus-patronymic form of address.
“But, no, you must call me Sasha.” The Russian offered the ultimate ice-breaker: the diminutive version of his first name.
“Jon,” Knox said, looking dubiously at his new, contraindicated friend.
As it turned out, he needn’t have worried; Sasha and Galina were neither dissidents nor informants. Like physics students the world over, they were almost wholly apolitical, and so caught up in their own complementary lines of research—Sasha going for his doctorate in astrophysics at Moscow State, and Galina a teenage prodigy in magnetohydrodynamics at a small, specialized institute across town—as to spare little interest for anything else.
Knox had read enough pop science—layman’s guide to relativity and such—to keep pace with his friends’ enthusiasms. The late-night sessions in Knox’s Moscow State dorm room sparkled and swirled with quasars and solar magnetospheres, neutron stars and black holes—the whole outré bestiary of fin-de-siècle astrophysics—as Sasha and Galina took turns grappling with the mysteries of the universe like cosmic tag-team wrestlers.
And, if conversation ever flagged on the cosmological front, the three could always fall back on that time-honored staple of Soviet discourse: the latest rumors.
And what rumors! In the perfect informational vacuum engineered by the authorities, the merest scrap of hearsay would inflate and distort into breathless, Byzantine extravagance.
“Here is one you cannot have heard, Dzhon,” Sasha would say, and then proceed to spin some improbable yarn about how the entire Soviet space program was being run on contraband microelectronics smuggled in from Silicon Valley.
But even Sasha’s best rumors paled by comparison with the one Knox himself had heard in a gypsy taxicab driving in from Sheremetevo Airport, the day of his arrival in August 1984. According to the cabby, the official reports that Yuri Andropov had succumbed to kidney failure in February of that year were lies, plain and simple. In reality, the then-General Secretary of the Communist Party and former KGB Chairman had been assassinated in his sickbed, stabbed through the heart by an unidentified hospital worker, who had thereupon promptly self-destructed.
The only time Sasha ever topped that one, it wasn’t with a rumor at all. It was with a mystery.
The occasion was pineapples. Knox had gotten in the habit of making the trek up from the archives to the US Embassy about once a week. If nothing else you could chow down on a reasonable facsimile of a cheeseburger at the snack bar, and sometimes there were delicacies to be had at the small commissary down in the basement. That day, a bitingly cold, clear day in mid-February, he had struck edible gold: pineapples! A whole binful of the succulent tropical fruit had been delivered that morning, and there were still three left by noon. Knox bought two.
The pineapples were a roaring success—with Sasha in particular.
He got a faraway look in his eye and reminisced how, as a child in Bratsk, he had once gotten close enough to a pineapple to actually smell it.
“And does the taste live up to what you remember of the smell?” Knox wanted to know.
Sasha’s grin made his words all but superfluous. “Live up to? It fulfils and overfulfils, my friend.”
“Must have been hard,” Knox mused, “growing up with so few luxuries—so few necessities, even. Vitamin C and all that, they’re kind of essential.”
“A hard life, yes, Dzhon,” Galina said. She came from Tomsk, on the edge of the great central plateau. “But also Siberia can be a magical place for a child. Have you heard, for instance, of ‘the whisper of stars’ ?”
Knox shook his head, saying nothing that might interrupt her. He loved to listen to Galya speak. Russian was a beautiful language in any case, but in her warm, gentle contralto, it became a song.
“Far out on the taiga, in the dead of winter, it grows very, very cold. Cold enough that a breath quickly freezes in midair. So quickly it makes a little tinkling sound. The whisper of stars, it is called.” She sighed, remembering. “It is enchanting.”
“Also cold enough that you dare not drink a glass of tea coming straight in from outdoors,” Sasha teased. “Or your teeth will crack.”
At a look from Galya, he relented. “No, truly, our frontier is a land of marvels—wooly mammoths perfectly preserved in the permafrost, prehistoric fishes still alive in the depths of Baikal. Legends of giant subterranean rats and ghost wolves and thunder gods bringing down the wrath of heaven. And, of course, the greatest wonder of all . . .”
Galina wrinkled her nose. “Please, no, Sasha. Not that old tale again.”
“Galya grows tired of hearing me speak of this.” He winked at Knox. “And yet it is the reason I study cosmology. How could the search for the secrets of the universe not be in my blood, when I was born less than five hundred kilometers from the epicenter of the mystery itself?”
And he told them then of Tunguska. Of a meteor strike with no meteor, of a ring of fire-scorched, blasted trees stretching for thousands of hectares in every direction, but no crater. Of his meeting there with an ancient Evenki shaman.
A shaman who claimed to have witnessed the thunderwings of the god Ogdy splitting open the sky and plummeting to earth.
And who, on learning that his young visitor yearned to know the secrets of the stars, had opened his medicine pouch and, from it, brought forth a very special gift . . .
“Knox? You still with us here?” The voice broke in on his reverie. He refocused his attention on an impatient-looking Aristos, hunched forward with his meaty forearms on the polyplast desktop.
“I don’t see what good I could do you,” Knox said at last. “I haven’t seen either Sasha or Galya in going on twenty years. I for sure never knew Sasha’d gone on to scale the heights of Russia, Incorporated. Not what I’d have expected from an astrophysicist.” Though Sasha had always seemed well-connected. And the brave, new post-Soviet world had seen stranger success stories.
“You didn’t try to keep in touch after you got back?” Aristos asked. “Sure, we sent letters back and forth, for a while. The visits from your friends in the ‘field agencies’ didn’t help matters any.”
“That’s just standard FBI exchange-student follow-up. And it worked: when we scanned for someone who could get to Bondarenko, out pops your name. Anything else? Beyond the letters, I mean.”
“Nothing,” Knox said. “Things were going to hell in a hand basket by then. Perestroika and glasnost were triggering the whole revolution-of-rising-expectations thing. I always thought we’d get back in contact after the dust settled.” He shrugged. “Never happened.”
“Well, Knox, you’re in luck. Rusalka docks in Baltimore this afternoon with Bondarenko aboard. Your reunion’s all set for tonight.”
“Grishin Enterprises is hosting a gala at the Kennedy Center,” Marianna elaborated, “A benefit for one of Grishin’s pet causes: Mir i Druzhba, his Peace and Friendship Foundation. Half the movers and shakers in Washington will be on hand for extra helpings of peace and friendship. You too, thanks to the email correspondence that put you back in touch with Sasha.”
Ignoring his glare, Marianna handed Knox an invitation featuring a hologram of the GEI Ourobouros and his own name in raised lettering. “Appropriate attire has already been delivered care of your hotel room. Questions?”
“You bet,” said Knox. “How about we start with: are you kidding?”
7 | Mythologies
“THE GERMAN WORD for Eagle.” Back home again at base camp, I Jack Adler was going back over the day’s events for an audience of one.
“And you are certain Hoffman never told the old shaman the meaning of your name?” Luciano Carbone asked.
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sp; “He swore not.” Jack shrugged. “Acted insulted I’d even think such a thing. I guess it’s some sort of ethnographic Prime Directive: never reinforce the natives’ belief system. Or challenge it for that matter.”
“And what of your own belief system, Jack? Was it challenged by Jenkoul’s tale?”
Jack rose from his borrowed camp stool and looked around. The silhouette of base camp’s main lodge showed dark against the sunset sky. Off in the distance, he could hear the muted rattle of his diesel generator, faithfully holding the SQUID’s temperature within operating range, reminding him of work still undone.
“Didn’t realize I’d been talking so long,” he said. “It’s getting late.”
“Nonsense.” Luciano glanced upward to where towering thunderheads shone red and gold in the last rays of the sun. “At home in Bologna, we eat dinner later than this. You do not evade the question so easily. What, if anything, might modern physics have to learn from an Evenki shaman?”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing, if you set aside all the mumbo-jumbo, that old guy’s a pretty credible witness for the Jackson-Ryan hypothesis.”
“But you just finished telling me his stories did not contain anything new.”
Jack nodded. “They didn’t, not about the Tunguska Event, anyway. But there’s one part I haven’t told you: Jenkoul went back.”
“What, back to the Epicenter?”
“Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I mean if something’d come within a whisker of killing me, you can bet I’d stay the hell away from then on. But Jenkoul’s clan had kind of figured him for their new shaman, even young as he was, on account of what he’d been through and all. And it wasn’t like they didn’t need one. But better to let Jenkoul tell you why in his own words.”
As he’d been doing all along, Jack scanned through his recording of the interview, till he’d found the part he meant to play for Luciano. Once again Jenkoul’s quavering tones alternated with Hoffman’s accented English:
The ring of fire burned itself out,
The sky purged itself of choking haze,
Yet still the world remained unhealed.
Neither winters snows nor springsfloods
Had power to leach from the land its lingering malignancy.
Summers new growth came up warped and scabrous,
All creatures feeding upon it sickened and died.
Strange, oozing lesions afflicted the reindeer,
And those of my own clansmen straying too far into the lands now under Ogdy’s curse.
Jack hit the pause button. “It got kind of ritualized in the retelling, I guess. But, to make a long story short, exactly one year after the Event, Jenkoul returned to the heartlands. And built him a sweatlodge in the middle of the Great Swamp, and sat down and waited for this Ogdy to show up.”
“Forgive me, Jack,” Luciano said, “but all this sounds simply like more of what you have already called ‘mumbo-jumbo.’ ”
“That’s because you haven’t heard the rest of it yet. Once you do, I think you’ll agree it’s a dead-on accurate recollection.”
“But, Jack, a recollection of what?”
“Of what it’d be like to be standing at the Epicenter when the micro-hole came zooming right straight up underneath you.”
The god comes, the god comes.
The earth trembles in fear at the coming of Ogdy.
The earth rises and falls beneath my feet, like waves of water.
My place of purification is overthrown, my lodgepoles topple.
The god comes.
Jack paused the playback again,. “I don’t know about you, Luciano. But, what with the ground shaking and the sweatlodge collapsing, it sure sounds like an earthquake to me.”
“But, but the Epicenter has been surveyed by every seismographic instrument known to science. Nothing of the sort has ever been observed, ever.”
“Oh, sure—now. But, remember, it took twenty years to get anything like a scientific expedition in there. If there was a primordial black hole circling round and round inside the Earth all that time, chances are its orbit would’ve degraded by then, down to where any seismic effects would have been undetectable—by 1920s equipment, at least.”
“And you are saying that, by the time we arrive here with our vastly superior instrumentation, it has receded even further.”
“Uh-huh. Five, ten kilometers down by now, I’d guess. But my point is, Jenkoul went out there a year after the event itself, in the summer of 1909. Back then you’d have measured the thing’s closest approach to the surface in inches, not miles. Now, picture a five-billion tonne gravitational point-source plowing up through solid rock at thousands of klicks an hour, up to within a few meters of the surface.
This is more your area than mine, Luciano—what’s that going to give you?
“Mmm. Compression and shear, certainly. And on a massive scale.” The little geologist tugged at his goatee. “I understand what you are saying, Jack: this could perhaps account for Jenkoul’s earthquake. Even so it hardly constitutes definitive proof of your black-hole hypothesis.”
“Hang on.” Jack advanced the recording to the next bookmark. “We’re not done yet.”
The god calls out.
Blinding-bright, his tongue lashes the sky.
His roar echoes off the hills, the heavens ring with it.
Ogdy is calling his avatar from the Lower World.
The earth at my feet burns at the touch of his fiery tongue.
The god calls out.
Jack stopped the recording there. “Hoffman says that’s all shaman-speak for a lightning bolt, one that may have just barely missed frying our friend, in fact.”
“But, Jack . . . lightning at midnight? From a cloudless sky?”
“That’s a tough one, all right. But, in a way, it’s maybe the key to the whole thing.”
“How so?”
“Well, these preferential lightning strikes say to me that whatever’s coming at Jenkoul is carrying a whole lot of charge, electric or magnetic. I’m betting magnetic, on account of the object’s age.”
“What would age have to do with it?” Luciano asked.
“Given enough time, an electrically-charged object would neutralize itself by attracting opposite charges. And my hole’s had the whole lifetime of the universe to do it in.”
“But magnetism is even worse in that regard, no? The force must always cancel itself out, since every magnet possesses two poles of opposite charge, north and south.”
“Nowadays, sure.” A faraway look glowed in Jack’s eyes. “But there was a time, a long, long time ago—within an eyeblink of the Beginning itself—when things could’ve been different. That’s when the primal superforce broke down. And, when it did, it tied the fabric of spacetime in knots.”
“Knots?”
“Uh-huh.” Jack nodded. “Very peculiar knots. Particles with an unpaired magnetic charge, a single pole—what we call monopoles. I think that may be what my hole’s made out of.”
“So, you believe the Tunguska Cosmic Body to be a black hole with a magnetic charge?”
“Not just any magnetic charge. A single pole without an opposite to offset it: a north, say, with no south.”
Luciano whistled. “That would be much more powerful than an ordinary magnet.”
“Uh-huh. Powerful enough to call down lightning out of a clear sky. Powerful enough to’ve trapped the thing here in the first place.”
“Yes, yes, now that you say it, I am eager to hear of this—your solution to the ‘exit event’ problem. You told Medvedev that your black hole must have remained within the Earth. But you did not explain how this is possible. Should not its speed have carried it out the other side?”
“Should have,” Jack conceded, “always assuming nothing slowed it down first.”
“But, Jack, what could slow something so small and yet so massive? My understanding is that it should have passed through the atmosphere and the solid earth with no resistance at all.”
Luciano’s face showed a flicker of recognition, but Jack would’ve bet that was more due to Stephen Hawking’s name than to any familiarity with the weird quantum process the man had discovered. A process by which black holes could give off particles. Radiation, in other words, heat. And the smaller the hole, the more particles it’d give off.
“Just take it from Steve Hawking,” Jack went on, “my micro hole’d be plenty hot. Surface temperature into the billions of degrees. Hot enough to strip the electrons off any nearby atoms on its way down . . . and leave an ionization contrail that’d put an Airbus-II to shame.”
“The ‘bright blue tube’ reported by the eyewitnesses,” Luciano said. “Exactly. But now watch what happens when you add a monopolar magnetic charge in on top of the radiation effects: the hole’s magnetic flux-lines are going to be sticking radially outward, like the spines on a Koosh ball. And the ions it’s churning out aren’t going to want to go crossing those lines of force. They’re going to latch onto the hole instead, and hang on for dear life. Get dragged along with it, sped up till they’re going faster than the speed of sound. And that means—”
“Sonic booms,” Luciano said half to himself. “All along the flight path, as the individual air molecules break the sound barrier.” Then he snapped his fingers. “That would explain the cannonades that accompanied the object’s descent.”
Jack nodded. “Plus, when that trailing column of superheated air slams into the ground, it’s going to destroy everything for miles around.”
“All the Tunguska phenomena, then.”
“Right,” Jack said, “but those are all just side effects, compared to the main event.”
Luciano stared at him expectantly. “Which is—?”
“Air-braking!”
“Air-braking, Jack?”
“Sure. See, the atmospheric drag just keeps piling up and up. It’s like the micro-hole’s this humongous broom, sweeping tons of atmosphere along in front of it, and every additional gram just slows it down more. Slows it down maybe to below escape velocity, to where it can’t climb back up out of Earth’s gravity-well anymore.”