Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  Grishin seemed to have forgotten all that. He merely smiled patiently at Knox and said, “I weary of your cynicism, my friend. You are the sort of fellow who sits on the sidelines and carps, while others must act to bring about what they believe in.”

  Oof, low blow! Knox was about to respond in kind when Yuri placed a heavy, admonitory hand on his shoulder. Rule Number One of debating the KGB: always let the KGB win.

  “Even as we must act now,” Grishin went on. “We go to set matters right at long last. We go to Antipode Station to ensure the future—our future.”

  He rummaged in his desk drawer. Withdrew a gleaming object, balanced it on his palm.

  “Sasha tells me the simultaneous existence of these two manifestations violates the Conservation of Energy principle, or something of that nature.” That offhanded shrug again.

  Knox felt chill: ripping holes in the fabric of spacetime was all in a day’s work for the new, improved KGB.

  Grishin looked up. “First, we shall expunge from history the senseless atrocity that put an end to the life of our Yuri Vladimirovich on the morning of February 9th 1984. And, then, having done so, we will lock in the new timeline—by sending back this.”

  A metallic ring resounded through Navtilus s cabin as Grishin dropped a short stubby cylinder onto the desktop. It rolled to a stop in front of Knox, the inscription facing up.

  Knowing what it had to say, Knox read it anyway. The Cyrillic letters were crisply, cleanly incised, with no trace of heat-warp: Тyнгyска VII-1989 Пoддepжaтb.

  Tunguska Cosmologist VII-1989 Support.

  41 | The Singularity

  “METAL OBJECTS? ANY metal objects? Very dangerous to enter Antipode Station bearing things of metal.” This high-pitched singsong, in alternating Russian and English, greeted them as they filed out of Navtilus and into Antipode’s cramped antechamber.

  Once through the airlock, Knox could see the source of the incantation: a stocky middle-aged woman in a white lab coat and radiation badge was working her way down the line of new arrivals. She waved a magic wand over each in turn, and, when it buzzed, collected watches, key chains, and other shiny trinkets for deposit in individually-labeled envelopes.

  Not his gold-nibbed Waterman, too? That was a bit of an overkill. Only ferromagnetic materials should be susceptible to Vurdalak’s monopolar field—metals like iron, nickel, cobalt. Come to think, that explained why Grishin had ordered his handcuffs removed. And why Marianna, the more “formidable” threat in their eyes, had been trussed in non-metallic webbing from the get-go.

  For his part, Yuri had to part with his blued-steel machine pistol. He hefted one of the short-stock laser rifles the rest of the six-man guard detail had been issued, but rejected it in favor of a lethal-looking ceramic revolver. Just not the slice-and-dice type, our Yuri. Likes to blow holes in things.

  By now the last of Navtilus’s passengers had been processed, but still they all stood there waiting in front of the heavy inner door. A door carved from the same basalt as the walls of the antechamber itself and emblazoned with a trisected magenta circle on a field of yellow—a warning of radiation hazards beyond.

  Even Grishin and his cronies, from their privileged position at the head of the line, were bearing the delay with stoic equanimity, patiently waiting for that door to swing back and admit them. What was it about Russians and lines? Something about queuing up that seemed to strike a responsive chord in the national character.

  Knox stood there watching the frosty clouds of his own breath, watching rivulets of moisture trickle down the rock walls in defiance of Antipode’s climate control. The chill, damp air of the antechamber was an unwelcome reminder that the primeval cold of the deep sea was encamped just beyond the airlock, seeking the least fissure through which it might breach the station’s defenses and pour in.

  Finally the line began moving, the inexplicable logjam inexplicably broken at last. As Yuri propelled Marianna forward, she cast a fleeting glance back at Knox, whether to seek reassurance or to offer it, he couldn’t tell.

  Then Knox was through the doorway himself and into a darkness relieved only by glowworms and fireflies. The glowworms were workstation displays in a glass-walled booth immediately to the right of the entrance, and the fireflies, the flashing of jib lights on a huge crane-like structure positioned somewhat left of center. Overhead, the disembodied red digits of a time-display plaque showed local and GMT time, plus a countdown with ten minutes and change to go till some unnamed event.

  As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, Knox could see that they were standing at the lip of a small amphitheater. Nine wide concentric tiers led downward into the dark, bottoming out in a narrow proscenium. The wall at the rear of that sunken platform bulged into the room, as if it were one section of a larger sphere. The only flat space on that wall was dead ahead, where an intricate-looking aperture sported its own circle of warning lights.

  Yep, this layout pretty much matched the schematics Marianna’d brought back from her foray into the then-secret lab. That meant the control room should be located against the wall to his right. There it was, the booth he’d noticed a moment ago, separated from the main chamber by walls of thick, green-tinted glass. And the operator sitting at the console wearing the funny hat. Hard to make out with only the light from the displays to go by, but—could that be Galina? Yes, it could, if her wave to Sasha was any indication.

  Was Galina in on this mad scheme to restore the ancien regime, too? Didn’t seem like her.

  No time to pause and reflect. They were on the move again, as Grishin led his entourage down to a seating gallery on the fifth level.

  It felt as if the whole chamber were tipping forward more and more the further down they went. Knox tightened his grip on the handrail as the floor seemed to slope away, an incline on its way to becoming a drop-off. Or was it all just imagination? Judging from the curvature of the wall-section ahead of—below?—him, and allowing for the thicknesses of heat-and radiation-shielding he hoped they’d thought to install . . . he had to be a good twenty-five or thirty feet out from the primordial black hole at Antipode’s heart. Could Vurdalak possibly exert its influence from that far away? It didn’t even mass as much as, say, Mount Everest. Then again, it was a point-source.

  He was trying to do the math, hampered by a blank spot in his memory where he thought he’d left the gravitational constant, when he chanced to look down. There, inset into the obsidian surface of the tier they’d halted at, glowing yellow characters read 9m—0.46 Tar.

  Let’s see, 9m just meant the nine-meter mark. And tyag. was most likely an abbreviation for tyagoteniye, gravity. So that meant . . .

  Christ! Knox felt tiny droplets of perspiration dot his brow. Vurdalak was exerting nearly half a gee of pull on him, right where he stood!

  He groped his way to a seat, bringing up the rear behind Sasha, Yuri, and Marianna. He was moving with elaborate caution now, bracing himself against a strategically-placed guardrail to keep from falling forwards—or was it downwards? Half a gee at nine meters out was no joke; at his weight, he was resisting a ninety-pound pull toward the front of the room. He studied the tiers below the seating level: two steps down, at the seven-meter mark, the micro-hole’s tug was over three-quarters of a gravity. The proscenium floor, where it abutted the outer hull of the containment sphere, sported a large, Day-Glo red 5m—1.5 THr.

  One and a half gravities down there! That was half the acceleration you’d feel blasting off in the Space Shuttle, and it was being generated by an object the size of an atom from five meters away. Knox was still trying to get his mind around that when he heard someone coming down the aisle.

  Grishin spoke, “Ms. Bonaventure, Mr. Knox, welcome to Antipode Station. You have arrived just in time for the penultimate act in our drama.” He nodded toward the countdown display. Less than seven minutes left.

  Grishin reached inside his jacket pocket and withdrew a handheld. “Ms. Bonaventure, we have reconfigured your communi
cator to route through Antipode’s local transponder, so that you may report to Mr. Aristos when the time comes. Yuri will hold onto it for you until then.”

  He handed the unit to the Georgian, then straightened. “As you can see, we conceal nothing. You will have every opportunity to judge the extent of our power, of our victory—in the few moments you will have to appreciate it.”

  A few moments? That didn’t sound good.

  “Ah, Arkasha?” Sasha raised his hand. “Perhaps if I were to explain what is about to happen?”

  “Do as you will, Sasha. I must see to our guests.” Grishin turned and crabwalked down the row of seats behind them, toward where his Council was settling in for the show.

  Sasha eased himself out of his seat and stood facing his impromptu audience, bracing himself on the handrail against Vurdalak’s insistent tug. The perch looked so precarious Knox was getting queasy just watching. But, then, Sasha had always been oblivious to external stimuli once in lecture mode.

  “As is well known,” he said, in English for Marianna’s benefit, “for complex undertakings, the most important thing is control and verification at every step along the critical path. Our Antipode Project is perhaps more complex than most.” He grinned. “On the other hand, it enjoys much greater possibilities for self-verification.” Sasha was taunting Knox—figure it out for yourself.

  Knox had, though only just this instant: “You mean you’ve been keeping your project on track using messages from the future?” The ultimate project-management utility! What Archon wouldn’t give for that.

  Sasha grinned again, as if at an apt pupil. “Molodyets!”—Attaboy!—“Yes, Dzhon, at each of eighteen key decision points over the lifetime of the project, we have received guidance from a timeprobe cylinder not unlike the ‘needle’ Arkady Grigoriyevich showed to you. The very first message, regarding selection of the Antipode site, was sent back to twelve years ago. The message arrived extremely distorted, almost as difficult to read as in 1984. But, of course, we were ready for this one, knew what it might say.”

  “Of course.” Knox was thinking ahead: they would have identified, twelve years in the past, what range of alternatives their future selves might pick among, and to where and when they’d send the message-probe announcing the correct choice. Then, once they’d received the probe, it was just a question of remembering to actually send it.

  “The rest of our probes did not go nearly so far back,” Sasha was saying. “Less distortion, easier to read. The writing on the one giving the go-ahead for capturing Vurdalak was quite clear. As Marianna, I believe, had the possibility to observe?”

  Marianna looked away. Doubtless would have crossed to the other side of the room if she could. That option was denied her: Yuri had spray-glued her makeshift manacles to the arm of her chair.

  Sasha affected not to notice the snub. “In any case, it is necessary now to provide causes for all those effects, returning each probe to the space-time coordinates where it first appeared.”

  “By all means. One Global Causality Violation could ruin your whole day.”

  Sasha grinned again. “Ah, you understand.”

  Knox could read Sasha’s mind: this convivial give-and-take was just like the old days in Moscow. No, Sasha, even the old days won’t be like the old days anymore, if Grishin gets his way.

  “Yes, it is necessary to keep temporal paradoxes to an absolute minimum,” Sasha said. “Over the past four hours, we have returned seventeen message probes to the times and places where they belong. So it is that we balance accounts with the universe, paying back now the loan of information previously borrowed from the future.” He winked. “And you did not believe me, Dzhon, when I told you cosmology was just like high finance.”

  Knox forced a half-hearted chuckle in return.

  “In any case, what you will witness in—” Sasha glanced over his shoulder at the countdown. “—one minute thirty-five seconds is the launching of our eighteenth and most recent timeprobe, for arrival less than thirty hours in the past. But enough talk, watch now.”

  As Sasha groped his way back to his seat, Knox sensed movement in the darkened hall. The crane arm to his left was beginning to shift position, stretching out toward the curved wall that formed the outermost shell of Vurdalak’s containment chamber.

  For long moments the only sound was the protesting of metal as the weight of the arm grew with its increasing proximity to Vurdalak. By the time the mechanism came to rest again, it was almost touching the still-closed Portal. Six lateral braces mounted evenly around the business end of the mechanical arm found corresponding sockets on the Portal’s rim and locked in place. The crane needed all the support it could get: the primordial black hole was only five meters away on the other side of the Portal.

  “Here. Put this on.” Sasha was holding out a small plastic rectangle with a blank gray window taking up half its surface: a radiation badge.

  “What’s the story, Sasha? You’re not seriously going to crack the seal on the containment chamber, are you? That thing in there puts out enough hard radiation to cook us in a microsecond!”

  “Not to worry, Dzhon. Badges are a precaution only,” Sasha said as he velcroed one on Marianna’s blouse as well.

  “Good news is, there is no radiation danger,” Sasha went on. “In, uh, forty-seven seconds we inject a Casimir capacitor into the chamber.

  Vurdalak’s event horizon goes away. And when it does, the radiation goes away with it.”

  Oh, right. No horizon, no radiation. Jack Adler had mentioned that. As rank speculation, though, not as something to bet your life on.

  “If that’s your idea of the good news, Sasha, I’m not sure I want to hear the bad.”

  “Bad news is: when radiation goes away, our power output drops. Bottom line: we must act quickly.”

  Of course. They’d be using Vurdalak’s radiation as a power source. With it cut off, there was a limit to how long the cryostats could stay at full strength. But if they browned out, the magnetic arrays would stop superconducting. The confinement field would fail, and it was all that was holding the black hole in place.

  Ulp! “Define ‘quickly’: how long have we got?”

  “To the cusp of destabilization? At least one thousand seconds.”

  “Please tell me those aren’t Chernobyl seconds, Sasha, old friend.” Russian engineers had a bad habit of slicing their safety margins to the bone, and this one was only fifteen minutes long to begin with.

  “Dzhon, relax. Computer alignment takes the longest, maximum two hundred seconds—for recent timeframes at least. Then we quick launch the probe, close the door, release the Casimir rectifier. Vurdalak reestablishes its event horizon. Radiation returns. We power up again. Simple.”

  Knox’s expression must have betrayed just how un-simple that sounded to him, because Sasha added quickly, “Galina has done this seventeen times already without mishap. In a certain sense, there can be no mishap—everything we do now has already happened.”

  He raised a hand as Knox opened his mouth to protest. “Stop talking, now, and watch. See our gateway into the past.”

  Knox looked up just as the countdown overhead went to zero. A synthesized female voice, vaguely reminiscent of Galina’s, said in Russian: “Singularity exposed. All readings nominal. Commencing worldline calibration.”

  Directly ahead, directly below, the iris began to dilate.

  And then . . .

  An eldritch light came seeping out through the widening Portal and around the eclipsing crane-arm, bathing the room in a nacreous glow.

  Adler and Sasha both had claimed a naked singularity wouldn’t give off any hard radiation. Knox hoped to hell they were right. He could almost feel the gamma rays sleeting through his unprotected body. Sometimes an overactive imagination was just no fun at all.

  And then . . .

  He was lost in wonder, fears forgotten, gazing on what Vurdalak had become. Gazing on the Singularity.

  He had been here before: that
single hallucinogenic rollercoaster ride that had brought an end to his grad school career, and, very nearly, him with it. He shuddered, remembering again that endless night two decades back. That experience, too, had begun with the world and everything in it splintering into delicate pointillistic patterns.

  He remembered how it had ended, too, with him spiraling down into the nothingness that waited in between the dots . . . Take it easy, Knox. The difference is, this time you can turn the whole thing off just by closing your eyes.

  Or could he? There was something odd about that light. He could see the whole of the circular aperture through which it poured, as if the spidery crane-arm which should have blocked his view wasn’t there at all. He held a hand in front of his face, lost sight of it in the gentle, insistent glow. Turned his head away, and found he was still looking at the light-show dead-on. It was as if the Singularity’s radiance weren’t entirely an objective, external phenomenon, as if it were something his consciousness was collaborating on—a joint effort between a self-aware observer and the universe at large.

  Experimentally, Knox squeezed his eyes shut. The effulgences shone bright as ever. What changed was he could no longer see his surroundings. The chair in which he sat, Marianna, Sasha, the whole room had gone away, leaving him floating disembodied and alone in the eerie lambency.

  And now the visions came.

  They had been there all along perhaps, the worldlines of every place and thing on Earth all tangled together by the Singularity into a tumult of white light. But with his eyes closed Knox found he could sort individual strands out of the flood. At first all he caught were random, dissociated glimpses of things—the tigers and pistons, astrolabes and armies of Borges’ Aleph flashing by him in dizzying succession: a small boy in homespun asleep beneath a tree of unfamiliar species; a bald, bespectacled man in formal attire sipping from a glass of water at a rostrum; a hydroelectric dam towering amid granite monoliths, water coursing down its spillway; a lone pine on a windswept hillside; a sundrenched bed nestling two lovers in flagrante delicto, both of them female; a latticework of underground conduits, vast mechanisms performing incomprehensible tasks off in the middle distance . . .