Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  So, with its barnstorming escort in place, the ship slid deeper into the crowded sky. The whole formation made bold faster-than-light jumps, roughly synchronised. Soon they penetrated the Central Star Mass.

  Futurity found Poole in the observation lounge, staring out at the crowded sky. The nearest stars hung like globe lamps, their discs clearly visible, with a deep three-dimensional array of more stars hanging behind them - stars beyond stars beyond stars, all of them hot and young, until they merged into a mist of light that utterly shut out any disturbing darkness.

  Against this background, Poole was a short, sullen form, and even the Mass’s encompassing brilliance didn’t seem to alleviate his heavy darkness. His expression was complex, as always.

  ‘I can never tell what you’re thinking, Michael Poole.’

  Poole glanced at him. ‘That’s probably a good thing . . . Lethe, this is the centre of the Galaxy, and the stars are crowded together like grains of sand in a sack. It’s terrifying! The whole place is bathed in light - why, if not for this ship’s shielding we’d all be fried in an instant. But to you, acolyte, this is normal, isn’t it?’

  Futurity shrugged. ‘It’s what I grew up with.’

  He tried to summarise for Poole the geography of the centre of the Galaxy. The structure was concentric - ‘Like an onion,’ Poole commented - with layers of density and complexity centred on Chandra, the brooding supermassive black hole at the centre of everything. The Core itself was the Galaxy’s central bulge, a fat ellipsoid of stars and shining nebulae set at the centre of the disc of spiral arms. Embedded within the Core was the still denser knot of the Central Star Mass. As well as millions of stars crammed into a few light years, the Mass contained relics of immense astrophysical violence, expanding blisters left over from supernovas, and tremendous fronts of roiling gas and dust thrown off from greater detonations at the Galaxy’s heart. Stranger yet was the Baby Spiral, a fat comma shape embedded deep in the Mass, like a miniature galaxy with its own arms of young stars and hot gases.

  And at the centre of it all was Chandra itself, the black hole, a single object with the mass of millions of stars. The Galaxy centre was a place of immense violence, where stars were born and torn apart in great bursts. But Chandra itself was massive and immovable, the pivot of vast astrophysical machineries, pinned fast to spacetime.

  Poole was intrigued by Futurity’s rough-and-ready knowledge of the Core’s geography, even though the acolyte had never before travelled away from 478. ‘You know it the way I knew the shapes of Earth’s continents from school maps,’ he said. But he was dismayed by the brusque labels Futurity and the crew had for the features of the centre. The Core, the Mass, the Baby: they were soldiers’ names, irreverent and familiar. In the immense glare of the Core there was no trace of mankind’s three-thousand-year war to be seen, but those names, Poole said, marked out this place as a battlefield - just as much as the traces of complex organic molecules that had once been human beings, hordes of them slaughtered and vaporised, sometimes still detectable as pollutants in those shining clouds.

  Something about the location’s complexity made Poole open up, tentatively, about his own experience: the Virtual’s, not the original.

  ‘When I was made fully conscious the first time, it felt like waking up. But I had none of the usual baggage in my head you carry through sleep: no clear memory of where I had been when I fell asleep, what I had done the day before - even how old I was. The priests quizzed me, and I slowly figured out where I was, and even what I was. I was shocked to find out when I was. Let me tell you,’ said Poole grimly, ‘that was tougher to take than being told I was worshipped as a god.’

  ‘You can remember your past life? I mean, Poole’s.’

  ‘Oh, yes. I remember it as if I lived it myself. I’m told they didn’t so much programme me,’ said Poole wistfully, ‘as grow me. They put together as much as they could about my life, and then fast-forwarded me through it all.’

  ‘So you lived out a computer-memory life.’

  Poole said, ‘My memory is sharp up to a point. I remember my father Harry, who, long after he was dead, came back to haunt me as a Virtual. I remember Miriam - somebody I loved,’ he said gruffly. ‘I lost her in time long before I lost myself. But it’s all a fake. I remember having free will and making choices. But I was a rat in a maze; the truth was I never had such freedom.

  ‘And the trouble is the records go fuzzy just at the point where my, or rather his, biography gets interesting to you theologians. What happened after I lost Miriam isn’t like a memory, it’s like a dream - a guess, a fiction somebody wrote out for me. Even to think about it blurs my sense of self. Anyhow I don’t believe any of it!

  ‘So I was a big disappointment, I think. Oh, the priests kept on developing me. They would download upgrades; I would wake up refreshed, rebooted. Of course I always wondered if I was still the same me as when I went to sleep. But I was never able to answer the theologians’ questions about the Ultimate Observer, or my jaunt through the wormholes, or about what I saw or didn’t see at Timelike Infinity. I wish I could! I’d like to know myself.

  ‘In the end they shut me down one last time. They promised me I’d wake up soon, as I always had. But I was left in my Virtual casket for a thousand years. The bastards. The next thing I saw was the ugly face of your Hierocrat, leaning over me.’

  ‘Perhaps they did crucify you, in the end.’

  Poole looked at him sharply. ‘You’ve got depths, despite your silly name, kid. Perhaps they did. What I really don’t understand is why they didn’t just wipe me off the data banks. Just sentimental, maybe.’

  Futurity said, ‘Oh, not that.’ The Hierocrat in his hurried briefing had made this clear. ‘They’d worked too hard on you, Michael Poole. They put in too much. Your Virtual representation is now more information-rich than I am, and information density defines reality. You may not be a god. You may not even be Michael Poole. But whatever you are, you are more real than we are, now.’

  Poole stared at him. ‘You don’t say.’ Then he laughed, and turned away.

  Still the Ask Politely burrowed deeper into the kernel of the Galaxy.

  VII

  At last the Ask Politely, with its Kardish escort, broke through veils of stars into a place the crew called the Hole. Under the same strict guarantees as before, Poole brought Mara to the observation deck.

  The ship came to a halt, suspended in a rough sphere walled by crowded stars. This was a bubble in the tremendous foam of stars that crowded the Galaxy’s centre, a bubble swept clean by a black hole’s gravity. Captain Tahget pointed out some brighter pinpoints; they were the handful of stars, of all the hundreds of billions in the Galaxy, whose orbits took them closest to Chandra. No stars could come closer, for they would be torn apart by Chandra’s tides.

  When Futurity looked ahead he could see a puddle of light, suspended at the very centre of the Hole. It was small, dwarfed by the scale of the Hole itself. It looked elliptical from his perspective, but he knew it was a rough disc, and it marked the very heart of the Galaxy.

  ‘It looks like a toy,’ Mara said, wondering.

  Poole asked, ‘You know what it is?’

  ‘Of course. It’s the accretion disc surrounding Chandra.’

  ‘Home,’ Poole said dryly.

  ‘Yes,’ Mara said. ‘But I never saw it like this before. The Kardish shipped us out in their big transports. Just cargo scows. You don’t get much of a view.’

  ‘And somewhere in there—’

  ‘Is my daughter.’ She turned to him, and the washed-out light smoothed the lines of her careworn face, making her look younger. ‘Thank you, Michael Poole. You have brought me home.’

  ‘Not yet I haven’t,’ Poole said grimly.

  The Ask Politely with its escort swooped down towards the centre of the Hole. That remote puddle loomed, and opened out into a broad sea of roiling gas, above which the ships raced.

  Infalling matter bled into this central whirl
pool, the accretion disc, where it spent hours or weeks or years helplessly orbiting, kneaded by tides and heated by compression until any remnants of structure had been destroyed, leaving only a thin, glowing plasma. It was this mush that finally fell into the black hole. Thus Chandra was slowly consuming the Galaxy of which it was the heart.

  Eventually Futurity made out Chandra itself, a fist of fierce light set at the geometric centre of the accretion disc, so bright that clumps of turbulence cast shadows light days long over the disc’s surface. It wasn’t the event horizon itself he was seeing, of course, but the despairing glow of matter crushed beyond endurance, in the last instants before it was sucked out of the universe altogether. The event horizon was a surface from which nothing, not even light, could escape, but it was forever hidden by the glow of the doomed matter which fell into it.

  Poole was glued to the window. ‘Astounding,’ he said. ‘The black hole is a flaw in the cosmos, into which a Galaxy is draining. And this accretion disc is a sink as wide as Sol system!’

  It was Mara who noticed the moistness on Poole’s cheeks. ‘You’re weeping.’

  He turned his head away, annoyed. ‘Virtuals don’t weep,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘You’re not sad. You’re happy,’ Mara said.

  ‘And Virtuals don’t get happy,’ Poole said. ‘It’s just - to be here, to see this!’ He turned on Futurity, who saw anger beneath his exhilaration, even a kind of despair, powerful emotions mixed up together. ‘But you know what’s driving me crazy? I’m not him. I’m not Poole. It’s as if you woke me up to torture me with existential doubt! He never saw this - and whatever I am, he is long gone, and I can’t share it with him. So it’s meaningless, isn’t it?’

  Futurity pondered that. ‘Then appreciate it for yourself. This is your moment, not his. Relish how this enhances your own identity - yours, uniquely, not his.’

  Poole snorted. ‘A typical priest’s answer!’ But he fell silent, and seemed a little calmer. Futurity thought he might, for once, have given Poole a little comfort.

  Tahget said grimly, ‘Before you get too dewy-eyed, remember this was a war zone.’ He told Poole how Chandra had once been surrounded by technology, a net-like coating put in place by beings who had corralled a supermassive black hole and put it to work. ‘The whole set-up took a lot of destroying,’ Tahget said evenly. ‘When we’d finished that job, we’d won the Galaxy.’

  Poole stared at him. ‘You new generations are a formidable bunch.’

  There were stars in the accretion disc. Tahget pointed them out.

  The disc was a turbulent place, where eddies and knots with the mass of many suns could form - and, here and there, collapse, compress and spark into fusion fire. These stars shone like jewels in the murky debris at the rim of the disc. But doomed they were, as haplessly drawn towards Chandra as the rest of the disc debris from which they were born. Eventually the most massive star would be torn apart, its own gravity no match for the tides of Chandra. Sometimes you would see a smear of light brushed across the face of the disc: the remains of a star, flensed and gutted, its material still glowing with fusion light.

  Some stars didn’t last even that long. Massive, bloated, these monsters would burst as supernovas almost as soon as they formed, leaving behind remnants: neutron stars - or even black holes, stellar-mass objects. Even Chandra couldn’t break open a black hole, but it would gobble up these babies with relish. When a black hole hit Chandra, so it was said, that immense event horizon would ring like a bell.

  It was towards one of these satellite black holes that the Ask Politely now descended.

  Dropping into the accretion disc was like falling into a shining cloud; billows and bubbles, filaments and sheets of glowing gas drifted upwards past the ship. Even though those billows were larger than planets - for the accretion disc, as Poole had noted, was as wide as a solar system itself - Futurity could see the billows churning as he watched, as if the ship was falling into a nightmare of vast, slow-moving sculptures.

  The approach was tentative, cautious. Captain Tahget said the Shipbuilders were having to be bribed with additional goodies; the swarming creatures were very unhappy at having to take their ship into this dangerous place. This struck Futurity as a very rational point of view.

  In the middle of all this they came upon a black hole.

  They needed the observation lounge’s magnification features to see it. With twice the mass of Earth’s sun, it was a blister of sullen light, sailing through the accretion clouds. Like Chandra’s, the dark mask of its event horizon - in fact only a few kilometres across - was hidden by the electromagnetic scream of the matter it sucked out of the universe. It even had its own accretion disc, Futurity saw, a small puddle of light around that central spark.

  And this city-sized sun had its own planet. ‘Greyworld,’ Mara breathed. ‘I never thought I’d see it again.’

  This asteroid, having survived its fall into Chandra’s accretion disc, had been plucked out of the garbage by the Ideocrats and moved to a safe orbit around the satellite black hole. The worldlet orbited its primary at about the same distance as Earth orbited its sun. And Greyworld lived up to its name, Futurity saw, for its surface was a seamless silver-grey, smooth and unblemished.

  To Mara, it seemed, this was home. ‘We live under the roof,’ Mara said. ‘It is held up from the surface by stilts.’

  ‘We used to call this paraterraforming,’ Poole said. ‘Turning your world into one immense building. Low gravity lets you get away with a lot, doesn’t it?’

  ‘The roof is perfectly reflective,’ Mara said. ‘We tap the free energy of the Galaxy centre to survive, but none of it reaches our homes untamed.’

  ‘I should think not,’ Poole said warmly.

  ‘It is a beautiful place,’ Mara said, smiling. ‘We build our houses tall; some of them float, or hang from the world roof. And you feel safe, safe from the violence of the galactic storms outside. You should see it sometime, Michael Poole.’

  Poole raised his eyebrows. ‘But, Mara, your “safe” haven is about as unsafe as it could get, despite the magical roof.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Tahget. ‘This black hole and its orbital retinue are well on their way into Chandra. After another decade or so the tides will pull the planetoid free of the hole, and after that they will rip off that fancy roof. Then the whole mess will fall into Chandra’s event horizon, and that will be that.’

  ‘Which is why Greyworld had to be evacuated,’ Futurity said.

  ‘The latest Kard is known for her humanitarian impulses,’ Tahget said dryly.

  Poole said, ‘All right, Mara, here we are. What now? Do you want to be taken down to Greyworld?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘What would be the point of that?’ She seemed faintly irritated. ‘I told you, Michael Poole. My Sharn isn’t on Greyworld. She’s there.’ And she pointed to the glimmering black hole.

  Tahget and his crew exchanged significant glances.

  Futurity felt a flickering premonition, the return of fear. This journey into the heart of the Galaxy had been so wondrous that he had managed, for a while, to forget the danger they were in. But it had all been a diversion. This woman, after all, controlled a bomb, and now they approached the moment of crisis.

  Poole drew him aside. ‘You look worried, acolyte,’ he murmured.

  ‘I am worried. Mara is still asking for the impossible. What do we do now?’

  Poole seemed much calmer than Futurity felt. ‘I always had a philosophy. If you don’t know what to do, gather more data. How do you know that what she wants is impossible?’ He turned to Tahget. ‘Captain, how close can you take us to the satellite black hole?’

  Tahget shook his head. ‘It’s a waste of time.’

  ‘But you don’t have any better suggestion, do you? Let’s go take a look. What else can we do?’

  Tahget grumbled, but complied.

  So the ship lifted away from Greyworld, and its retinue of Kardish greenships formed up onc
e more. Mara smiled, as if she was coming home at last. But Futurity shivered, for there was nothing remotely human about the place they were heading to now.

  Slowly the spiteful light of the satellite black hole drew closer.

  ‘Acolyte,’ Poole murmured. ‘You have a data desk?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then start making observations. Study that black hole, Futurity. Figure out what’s going on here. This is your chance to do some real science, for once.’

  ‘But I’m not a scientist.’

  ‘No, you’re not, are you? You’re too compromised for that. But you told me you were curious, once. That was what drove you out of the farm and into the arms of the Ecclesia in the first place.’ He sighed. ‘You know, in my day a kid like you would have had better opportunities.’