Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Futurity felt moved to defend his vocation. ‘I don’t think you understand the richness of theological—’

  ‘Just get the damn desk!’

  Futurity hurried to his cabin and returned with his data desk. It was the Ecclesia’s most up-to-date model. He pressed the desk to the observation lounge blister, and checked it over as data poured in.

  ‘I feel excited,’ he said.

  ‘You should,’ Poole said. ‘You might make some original discovery here. And, more important, you might figure out how to save all our skins, my Virtual hide included.’

  ‘I’m excited but worried,’ Futurity admitted.

  ‘That sounds like you.’

  ‘Michael Poole, how can a human child survive in a black hole?’

  Poole glanced at him approvingly. ‘Good; that’s the right question to ask. You need to cultivate an open mind, acolyte. Let’s assume Mara’s serious, that she knows what she’s talking about.’

  ‘That she’s not crazy.’

  ‘Open mind! Mara has implied - I think - that we’re not talking about the child in her physical form but some kind of download, like a Virtual.’

  Futurity asked, ‘But what information can be stored in a black hole? A hole is defined only by its mass, charge and spin. You need rather more than three numbers to define a Virtual. But no human science knows a way to store more data than that in a black hole - though it is believed others may have done so in the past.’

  Poole eyed him. ‘Others? . . .’ He slapped his own cheek. ‘Never mind. Concentrate, Poole. Then let’s look away from the hole itself, the relativistic object. We’re looking for structure, somewhere you can write information. Every black hole is embedded in the wider universe, and every one of them comes with baggage. This satellite hole has its own accretion disc. Maybe there ...’

  But Futurity’s scans of the disc revealed nothing. ‘Michael Poole, it’s basically a turbulence spectrum. Oh, there is some correlation of structure around a circumference, and over time tied into the orbital period around the black hole.’

  ‘But that’s just gravity, the inverse square law, defined by one number: the black hole’s mass. All right, what else have we got?’ Inexpertly Poole tapped at a Virtual clone of Futurity’s desk. He magnified an image of the hole itself. It was a flaring pinprick, even under heavy magnification. But Poole played with filters until he had reduced the central glare, and had brought up details of the background sky.

  A textured glow appeared. A rough sphere of pearly gas surrounded the black hole and much of its accretion disc, and within the sphere a flattened ellipsoid of brighter mist coalesced closer to the hole.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Poole.

  Futurity, entranced, leaned closer to see. ‘I never knew black holes had atmospheres! Look, Michael Poole, it is almost like an eye staring at us - see, with the white, and then this iris within, and the black hole itself the pupil.’

  Tahget listened to this contemptuously. ‘Evidently neither of you has been around black holes much.’ He pointed to the image of the accretion disc. ‘The hole’s magnetic field pulls material out of the disc, and hurls it into these wider shells. We call the outer layers the corona.’

  Futurity said, ‘A star’s outer atmosphere is also a corona.’

  ‘Well done,’ said Tahget dryly. ‘The gas shells around black holes and stars are created by similar processes. Same physics, same name.’

  Poole said, ‘And the magnetic field pumps energy into these layers. Futurity, look at this temperature profile!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tahget. ‘In the accretion disc you might get temperatures in the millions of degrees. In the inner corona’ - the eye’s ‘iris’ - ‘the temperatures will be ten times hotter than that, and in the outer layers ten times hotter again.’

  ‘But the magnetic field of a spinning black hole and its accretion disc isn’t simple,’ Poole said. ‘It won’t be just energy that the field pumps in, but complexity.’ He was becoming more expert with the data desk now. He picked out a section of the inner corona, and zoomed in. ‘What do you make of that, Futurity?’

  The acolyte saw wisps of light, ropes of denser material in the turbulent gases, intertwined, slowly writhing. They were like ghosts, driven by the complex magnetic fields, and yet, Futurity immediately thought, they had a certain autonomy. Ghosts, dancing in the atmosphere of a black hole! He laughed with helpless delight.

  Poole grinned. ‘I think we just found our structure.’

  Mara was smiling. ‘I told you,’ she said. ‘And that’s where my daughter is.’

  VIII

  It took a detailed examination of the structures in the black hole air, a cross-examination of Mara, input from the experienced Captain Tahget, and some assiduous searching of the ship’s data stores - together with some extremely creative interpolation by Michael Poole - before they had a tentative hypothesis to fit the facts about what had happened here.

  Like so much else about this modern age, it had come out of the death of the Interim Coalition of Governance.

  Poole said, ‘Breed, fight hard, die young, and stay human: you could sum up the Coalition’s philosophy in those few words. In its social engineering the Coalition set up a positive feedback process; it unleashed a swarm of fast-breeding humans across the Galaxy, until every star system had been filled.’ Poole grinned. ‘Not a noble way to do it, but it worked. And we did stay human, for twenty thousand years. Evolution postponed!’

  ‘It wasn’t as simple as that,’ Futurity cautioned. ‘Perhaps it couldn’t have been. The Shipbuilders slid through the cracks. There were even rumours of divergences among the soldiers of the front lines, as they adapted to the pressures of millennia of war.’

  ‘Sure.’ Poole waved a hand. ‘But these are exceptions. You can’t deny the basic fact that the Coalition froze human evolution, for the vast bulk of mankind, on epic scales of space and time. And by doing so, they won their war. Which was when the trouble really started.’

  The heirs of the Coalition were if anything even more fanatical about their ideology and purpose than their predecessors had ever been. They had called themselves the Ideocracy, precisely to emphasise the supremacy of the ideas which had won a Galaxy, but of which everybody else had temporarily lost sight.

  In their conclaves the Ideocrats sought a new strategy. Now that the old threat had been vanquished, nobody needed the Coalition any more. Perhaps, therefore, the Ideocrats dreamed cynically, a conjuring-up of future threats might be enough to frighten a scattered humanity back into the fold, where they would be brought once more under a single command - that is, under the Ideocrats’ command - just as in the good old days. Whether those potential threats ever came to pass or not was academic. The cause was the thing, noble in itself.

  The Ideocrats’ attention focused on Chandra, centre of the Galaxy and ultimate symbol of the war. The great black hole had once been used as a military resource by the foe of mankind. What if now a human force could somehow occupy Chandra? It would be a hedge against any future return by the Xeelee - and would be a constant reminder to all mankind of the threat against which the Ideocracy’s predecessor had fought so long, and on which even now the Ideocracy was focused. A greater rallying cry could hardly be imagined; Ideocracy strategists imagined an applauding mankind returning gratefully to its jurisdiction once more.

  But how do you send people into a black hole? Eventually a way was found. ‘But,’ Poole said, ‘they had to break their own rules . . .’

  Far from resisting human evolution, the Ideocrats now ordered that deliberate modifications of mankind be made: that specifically designed post-humans be engineered to be injected into new environments. ‘In this case,’ Poole said, ‘the tenuous atmosphere of a black hole.’

  ‘It’s impossible,’ said Captain Tahget, bluntly disbelieving. ‘There’s no way a human could live off wisps of superheated plasma, however you modified her.’

  ‘Not a human, but a post-human,’ Michael Poole sai
d testily. ‘Have you never heard of pantropy, Captain? This is your age, not mine! Evolution is in your hands now; it has been for millennia. You don’t have to think small: a few tweaks to the bone structure here, a bigger forebrain there. You can go much further than that. I myself am an example.

  ‘A standard human’s data definition is realised in flesh and blood, in structures of carbon-water biochemistry. I am realised in patterns in computer cores, and in shapings of light. You could project an equivalent human definition into any medium that will store the data - any technological medium, alternate chemistries of silicon or sulphur, anything you like from the frothing of quarks in a proton to the gravitational ripples of the universe itself. And then your post-humans, established in the new medium, can get on and breed.’ He saw their faces, and he laughed. ‘I’m shocking you! How delicious. Two thousand years after the Coalition imploded, its taboos still have a hold on the human imagination.’

  ‘Get to the point, Virtual,’ Tahget snapped.

  ‘The point is,’ Mara put in, ‘there are people in the black hole air. Out there. Those ghostly shapes you see are people. They really are.’

  ‘It’s certainly possible,’ Poole said. ‘There’s more than enough structure in those wisps of magnetism and plasma to store the necessary data.’

  Futurity said, ‘But what would be the point? What would be the function of these post-humans?’

  ‘Weapons,’ Poole said simply.

  Even when Greyworld was ripped away and destroyed by Chandra’s tides, the satellite black hole would sail on, laden with its accretion disc and its atmosphere - and carrying the plasma ghosts that lived in that atmosphere, surviving where no normal human could. Perhaps the ghosts could ride the satellite hole all the way into Chandra itself, and perhaps, as the small hole was gobbled up by the voracious central monster, they would be able to transfer to Chandra’s own much more extensive atmosphere.

  ‘Once aliens infested Chandra,’ Poole said. ‘It took us three thousand years to get them out. So the Ideocrats decided they were going to seed Chandra with humans - or at least post-humans. Then Chandra will be ours for ever.’

  Captain Tahget shook his head, grumbling about ranting theorists and rewritings of history.

  Futurity thought all this was a wonderful story, whether or not it was true. But he couldn’t forget there was still a bomb on board the ship. Cautiously, he said to Mara, ’And one of these - uh, post-humans - is your daughter?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mara said.

  Tahget was increasingly impatient with all this. ‘But, woman! Can’t you see that even supposing this antiquated Virtual is right about pantropy and post-humans, whatever might have been projected into the black hole atmosphere can no more be your daughter than Poole here can be your son? You are carbon and water, it is a filmy wisp of plasma. Whatever sentimental ties you have, the light show in that cloud has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Not sentimental,’ she said clearly. ‘The ties are real, Captain. The person they sent into that black hole is my daughter. It’s all to do with loyalty, you see.’

  The Ideocrats, comparative masters when it came to dominating their fellow humans, had no experience in dealing with post-humans. They had no idea how to enforce discipline and loyalty over creatures to whom ‘real’ humans might seem as alien as a fly to a fish. So they took precautions. Each candidate pantropic was born as a fully biological human, from a mother’s womb, and each spent her first fifteen years living a normal a life - normal, given she had been born on a tent-world in orbit around a black hole.

  ‘Then, on her sixteenth birthday, Sharn was taken,’ Mara said. ‘And she was copied.’

  ‘Like making a Virtual,’ Poole mused. ‘The copying must have been a quantum process. And the data was injected into the plasma structures in the black hole atmosphere.’ He grinned. ‘You can’t fault the Ideocrats for not thinking big! And that’s why there are people here in the first place - I mean, a colony with families - so that these wretched exiles would have a grounding in humanity, and stay loyal. Ingenious.’

  ‘It sounds horribly manipulative,’ said Futurity.

  ‘Yes. Obey us or your family gets it . . .’

  Mara said, ‘We knew we were going to lose her, from the day Sharn was born. We knew it would be hard. But we knew our duty. Anyhow we weren’t really losing her. We would always have her, up there in the sky.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ groused the Captain. ‘After your daughter was “copied”, why didn’t she just walk out of the copying booth?’

  ‘Because quantum information can’t be cloned, Captain,’ Poole said gently. ‘If you make a copy you have to destroy the original. Which is why young Futurity’s superiors were so agitated when I was transferred into this ship’s data store: there is only ever one copy of me. Sharn could never have walked out of that booth. She had been destroyed in the process.’

  Futurity gazed out at the wispy black hole air. ‘Then - if this is all true - somewhere in those wisps is your daughter. The only copy of your daughter.’

  Poole said, ‘In a deep philosophical sense, that’s true. It really is her daughter, rendered in light.’

  Futurity said, ‘Can she speak to you?’

  ‘It was never allowed,’ Mara said wistfully. ‘Only the commanders had access, on secure channels. I must say I found that hard. I don’t even know how she feels. Is she in pain? What does it feel like to be her now?’

  ‘How sad,’ Poole said. ‘You have your duty - to colonise a new world, the strange air of the black hole. But you can’t go there; instead you have to lose your children to it. You are transitional, belonging neither to your ancestors’ world or your children’s. You are stranded between worlds.’

  That seemed to be too much for Mara. She sniffed, and pulled herself upright. ‘It was a military operation, you know. We all accepted it. I told you, we had our duty. But then the Kard’s ships came along,’ she said bitterly. ‘They just swept us up and took us away, and we didn’t even get to say goodbye.’

  Tahget glared. ‘Which is why you hijacked my ship and dragged us all to the centre of the Galaxy!’

  She smiled weakly. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  Futurity held his hands up. ‘I think what we need now is to find an exit strategy.’

  Poole grinned. ‘At last you’re talking like an engineer, not a priest.’

  Futurity said, ‘Mara, we’ve brought you here as we promised. You can see your daughter, I guess. What now? If we take you to the planetoid, would you be able to talk to her?’

  ‘Not likely,’ Mara said. ‘The Kardish troops were stealing the old Ideocracy gear even before we lifted off. I think they thought the whole project was somehow unhealthy.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Poole. ‘I can imagine they will use this as a propaganda tool in their battle with the Ideocracy.’

  ‘Pah,’ spat Tahget. ‘Never mind politics! What the acolyte is asking, madam, is whether you will now relinquish your bomb, so we can all get on with our lives.’

  Mara looked up at the black hole, hesitating. ‘I don’t want to be any trouble.’

  Tahget laughed bitterly.

  ‘I just wish I could speak to Sharn.’

  ‘If we can’t manage that, maybe we can send a message,’ said Michael Poole. He grinned, snapped his fingers, and disappeared.

  And reappeared in his skinsuit, out in space, on the other side of the blister.

  Captain Tahget raged, ‘How do you do that? After your last stunt I ordered your core processors to be locked down!’

  ‘Don’t blame your crew, Captain,’ came Poole’s muffled voice. ‘I hacked my way back in. After all, nobody knows me as well as I do. And I was once an engineer.’

  Tahget clenched his fists uselessly. ‘Damn you, Poole, I ought to shut you down for good.’

  ‘Too late for that,’ Poole said cheerfully.

  Futurity said, ‘Michael Poole, what are you going to do?’

  Mara was the first to
see it. ‘He’s going to follow Sharn. He’s going to download himself into the black hole air.’

  Futurity stared at Poole. ‘Is she right?’

  ‘I’m going to try. Of course I’m making this up as I’m going along. My procedure is untested; it’s all or nothing.’

  Tahget snorted. ‘You’re probably an even bigger fool than you were alive, Poole.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘All this is surmise. Even if it was the Ideocracy’s intention to seed the black hole with post-humans, we have no proof it worked. There may be nothing alive in those thin gases. And even if there is, it may no longer be human! Have you thought of that?’

  ‘Yes,’ Poole said. ‘Of course I have. But I always did like long odds. Quite an adventure, eh?’