“They’re ready to practice with you.”
“And where will you be?” After a pause: “Milady.”
“Elsewhere.” It tingled through her skin. “I’ve given them their basic instruction. Now I should not be underfoot. It’s your team. Get them into unison with you.”
“I see,” he said. “And you will be elsewhere.”
“Look,” she pointed out, as mildly as possible, “it shouldn’t take long. I hope not. We don’t want to come late for the big event. However, when you’re prepared, we’ll take two extra watches and rest before we proceed to destination. We’ll do it under boost, so everybody can feel at ease while regaining some muscle tone. Captain Valen thinks, and I agree, we’d better reach the scene in optimum condition. That’ll give you time to complete this project of yours, if you want.” And you will. You don’t sleep much or well, do you?
“Captain Valen.” Esker’s attention went back to his computer. “Very well, milady. Now, if you will excuse me, I may be able to write this subroutine before assuming my duties.”
“Of course.” If only I could share happiness with you who hardly know what it is. Impossible. So why mar mine? “Good luck.” Lissa left him.
Elif, Noel, and Tessa were fixing their meal, but the Susaian was evidently through eating. By tacit accommodation, he did so alone. Communality would have been awkward, given the differences in shape. “Will you not join your fellows?” he hailed her.
Courtesy demanded she press palm against bulkhead and brake herself. “Later,” she said. “I must report to the skipper.”
The luminous eyes searched her. “You are hungry.”
She laughed. It sounded the least bit nervous to her. “Does [105] your emotion-reading extend to that? Yes, I would like a sandwich, but it can wait.”
The artificial voice lowered together with the sibilant purring. “Honored one, let me suggest you be more ... circumspect. Feelings toward you have intensified.”
Blood throbbed in her throat. “What do you mean?”
A ripple down the long body might correspond to a shrug. “I detect emotions, not thoughts, and with an alien race my perceptions are basic; nuances are lost on me. Still, I can identify joy, and rageful bitterness, and even amicable, slightly prurient curiosity. This enables me to make deductions that as yet are probably mere speculations in the minds of the rest.” Those lips could not smile, and the speech was synthetic. Yet did she sense benevolence, concern, perhaps a kind of love? “None of my business, as your saying goes, especially when I am a total outsider. But I do pray leave to counsel discretion. We are embarking into mystery. We must remain united.
“Sufficient.”
Orichalc departed. She looked after him till he disappeared around a corner, before she continued forward.
He’s right, she knew. We have been careless, Gerward and I. Well, it happened so suddenly, overwhelmingly. ... No justification. We’re not freed from our responsibility for crew and mission.
On earlier expeditions she had stayed prudent, celibate except on the two she made in company with Tomas Whiteriver, and there it was known beforehand that they would be together. (They had dreamed of forging one more marriage bond between their Houses. That faded out with the relationship, in wistful but not unpleasant wise. He was too immature.) Planetside, you could be as private as you wanted, and in any event jealousy wouldn’t create a hazard.
But damn it, Gerward’s the best lover I’ve ever had or hoped to have. Knowing, considerate, ardent. As fine a human being as I’ll ever meet. Wise, gentle, resolute. He’s come back out of the [106] night—I raised him from it, he says—with a strength, a knowledge, beyond my imagining, I who have never been there. Dad and Mother won’t be happy at first, but they’ll learn, they too.
Meanwhile, yes, of course, we’d better see to our masks. If we can. How do you appear in public not radiating gladness?
XVIII
JUMP.
Brilliance.
Slowly, she eased. Nothing had happened. She floated before the weapons console in silence and the ocean of stars. Well, she thought, we knew Orichalc’s fix was rough, and the smallest difference in astronomical distances is big beyond our conceiving.
She gazed about her, searching the strangeness for anything she might identify, as the Susaian had done. Magellanic Clouds, Andromeda galaxy, a few naked-eye sisters—clotted darkness shielded her from the blaze at the heart of her own galaxy and marked it for her—an obvious blue giant, ten or twenty light-years away, might be in some survey catalogue—
“What do you detect?” Valen breathed through the night.
“No radiations such as spacecraft emit,” Dagmar reported. “An anomalous source at 1926 hours planar, sixty-two degrees south. Radio, optical, X-ray; possible neutrino component.”
Excitement pulsed in Valen’s voice: “That’s got to be it. All right, let’s aim the array.”
“Request permission to leave my post,” Lissa said.
“Granted,” Valen answered. “Come join me. We may want to swap ideas off the intercom, not to disturb the scientists.”
You transparent innocent! Lissa thought. We could talk directly, cubicle to cabin. ... Well, but if I know Esker, he’s now too engaged in his work to notice. ... Never mind him. What better time to be at your side, darling?
She hastened. Glorious though the sight was, he had abandoned it for his quarters. The kiss lasted long. “Hold, hold,” he [108] mumbled when her hands began to move. “We’d better wait a while. The team should have word for us in a few minutes.”
“I know,” she said in his ear. “Make some arrangements for later, though, will you? And not much later, either. Have I told you you’re as good in zero gee as you are under boost?”
He chuckled, low in his throat. “The feeling’s mutual. Uh, the ship—”
“Oh, Dagmar knows too, the way we kept forgetting she existed. And if we cut her off now, we might delay an emergency call. You won’t tell on us, will you, Dagmar dear?”
“I am programmed not to reveal mission-irrelevant matters to others than the captain upon command, and yourself,” replied the sweet tones. “Those will be wiped upon our return, prior to logging the permanent record.”
“Yes, yes. But it’s nice of you to, well, care.” Did the robotic brain? A philosophical question, never really answered. Certainly Dagmar was not, could not be voyeuristic. Still, her consciousness didn’t seem completely impersonal and aloof. And—Lissa felt a blush—that unseen presence did add a little extra spice.
As if any were needed! She nuzzled. “You smell good,” she murmured. “Clean but male. Or should that be male but clean?”
Half an hour passed. They required something to discuss if they were to stay chaste and alert. Valen declined their search as a subject. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data,” he said. She got the impression he was quoting, perhaps a translation from an ancient writer; like her father, or like Romon Kesperson, or like Torben Hebo, she supposed ... How was he doing? ... he read widely.
Well, she and Gerward had their future to imagine, and to plan soberly. They were quite aware that much in it would be difficult, especially at first, before he had once more fully proven himself.
The intercom chimed. They accepted. Esker sounded almost friendly, or was that sheer exuberance? Whichever, Lissa was delighted to hear it. “We’ve got our preliminary data, Captain, [109] milady. Something peculiar, for certain. I’d rather keep my ideas in reserve for the moment.”
Valen, too, showed pleasure. “What can you tell, in layman’s language?”
“Well, actually there are two radiation sources. Radial velocities seem to indicate galactic orbits, but highly eccentric. Spectra indicate mostly hydrogen, some helium, traces of metals. In short, interstellar medium, but at sunlike temperatures. Each source appears to be rotating differentially, the inner parts at speeds approaching c, but we aren’t sure of that yet. Nor of much else, aside from— It is extraordinary
, Captain.”
“Good work. I hereby become your errand boy. What do you want us to do?”
“Skip around. Get parallaxes so we can determine the location in space, transverse component of velocity, intrinsic brightness. Observing from various distances, over a range of a hundred parsecs or so, we can follow any evolution that’s been taking place. That should let us figure out the nature of the beast.”
Valen frowned. Esker’s reply had been scoffingly obvious. Valen’s brow cleared. Lissa saw he was willing to overlook the matter. As keyed up as he was, Esker doubtless bypassed tact without noticing. “Fine. Give me your plan.”
“I’ll develop it as we go along and collect more information. For the present, hm, I must do some figuring. I’ll get back to you with the coordinates of the next observation point in about an hour.” The physicist cut the connection.
“An hour,” Lissa said. “That’ll serve.”
Valen blinked. “What?”
“An hour of our own. Let’s take advantage. We may not have more for some time to come.”
XIX
FIFTY hours of leap, study, leap were unendurably long and unbelievably few. At the end, the travelers met in the saloon. Word like this should be face to face, where hand could seize hand. For it, they gave themselves boost, weight, that they might sit around the table at ease, perhaps the last ease they would ever know.
Esker rose. Pride swelled his stumpy form. “I am ready to tell you what I have found,” he said.
“After the Great Confederacy.” Orichalc murmured the words, but forgot to keep the trans equally quiet. Well, Lissa thought beneath her heart-thumping, Children’s Day morning expectancy, of course all beings want their races given all due honor, whether or not they like the governments.
Esker surprised her with a mild answer: “True. And your people scarcely came upon this by last-minute accident. I imagine a survey ship found it ten or twenty years ago. They—the rulers, that is—saw the potentialities, but bided their time till the climactic moment neared. Humans couldn’t have kept a secret like that.”
Has his triumph made him gentler? wondered Lissa. I’m glad for you, Esker.
“What are the potentialities, then?” Valen demanded.
“I don’t know,” the physicist replied. “Neither do the Susaians, or they wouldn’t be making such an effort.” He paused. Something mystical entered his speech, his whole manner. “An unprecedented event, rare if not totally unique in the universe. Who can say what it will unleash? Quite possibly, phenomena [111] never suspected by us. Conceivably, laws of nature unknown even to the Forerunners.”
And what technologies, what powers might spring from those discoveries? went chill through Lissa. For good or ill, salvation or damnation. I can’t blame the Susaians or the Domination for wanting to keep it to themselves. I wish we humans could.
“Tell us what it is!” she blurted.
The three assistants shifted on their bench. They knew. Their master had laid silence on them. This was to be his moment.
He looked at her and measured out his words. “I can give you the basic fact in a single sentence, milady. Two black holes are on a collision course.”
Orichalc hissed and Valen softly whistled.
Black holes, Lissa evoked from memory. Stars two—or was it three?—or more times greater than Sunniva, ragingly luminous, consuming their cores with nuclear fire until after mere millions of years they exploded as supernovae, briefly rivaling their whole galaxy; then the remnant collapsing, but not into the stability of a neutron star. No, the mass was still huge, gravitation overcame quantum repulsion, shrinkage went on and on toward zero size and infinite density, though to an outside observer it soon slowed almost to a halt and would take all eternity to reach its end point. The force of gravity rose until light itself could not escape. ...
She had seen pictures of a few, taken from spacecraft at a distance and by probes venturing closer. No more than that; their kind was surely numbered in the billions, but explorers were still ranging only this one tiny segment of a thinly populated outer fringe of the galaxy.
Wonder and terror enough, just the same. The event horizon, the sphere of ultimate darkness, was asteroid size, sometimes visible as a tiny round blot in heaven, sometimes not. For it captured matter from space, and if there happened to be enough of that nearby, a nebula or, still more so, a companion sun from which the hole sucked mass, then fire wheeled around it, the accretion disc, spiraling ever faster into the maw, giving off a blaze of energy [112] as it fell. The stupendous gravity dragged at light waves, reddened them, twisted their paths. Its tidal pull stretched a probe asunder and whirled the fragments off into the disc. ... Most of the knowledge was to Lissa little more than words, quantum tunneling, Hawking radiation, space and time interchangeably distorted. ...
I’m not badly informed for a layman, she thought. I remember Professor Artur remarking how much remains unknown to any of the spacefaring races. He felt that in the nature of the case it would always be unknown too, because there is no possible way for information to reach us through the event horizon. But if a pair of them crash together—
“That must be rare indeed,” Orichalc said low.
“Unless at galactic center?” Valen mused.
“Conjecture,” Esker snorted. “Yes, perhaps lesser black holes are among the stars that the Monster engulfs. That might help account for some of the things we have glimpsed there, such as short-lived trails of radiation. They may be from matter that it somehow accelerates almost to light speed, soon slowed down again by interaction with the interstellar medium. We don’t know. I tell you, in spite of all proud pretensions to having a final theory, we don’t know.”
The Monster, Lissa remembered. The truly gigantic black hole at the galactic heart, hidden from sight behind the dust clouds gathered around there, barred from exploration by unloosed energies that would almost instantly kill any organic being and wreck the circuits of any robot.
How did the conventional scientists dare imagine that no fundamental mysteries remained in the universe?
Esker’s voice lifted as if in triumph. “Here such an event is out where we can watch it.”
Again the academic tone took over. “Also, this is not a simple linear collision, such as we believe we have some theoretical understanding of. That would be vanishingly improbable, two singularities aimed straight at each other. This will be a grazing encounter, the convergence of two eccentric galactic orbits.
[113] “From our observation of orbits and accelerations, we’ve obtained the masses of the bodies with considerable accuracy. They are approximately nine and ten Sols. That means the event horizons are about sixty kilometers in diameter. Calculation of closest approach—that involves some frank guesswork. We have good figures for the orbital elements. If these were Newtonian point masses, they’d swing by on hyperbolic paths at a distance of about thirty kilometers and a speed of about one-third light’s. But they aren’t, and it’d be a waste of breath to give you exact figures, when all I’m sure of is that the event horizons will intersect. The ship has programs taking relativistic and quantum effects into account. I’ve used them. However, certain key answers come out as essentially nonsense. The matrices blow up in a mess of infinities. We simply don’t know enough. We shall have to observe.
“Observe,” he whispered. “See.”
“Can we get that near, and live?” Valen asked.
“As near as the Susaians, I daresay.” Now Esker sounded boyishly bold and careless.
“How near is that, do you suppose?”
“Probably closer than humans would venture, if this were their project from the beginning. We’d send in sophisticated robotic vessels. The Susaians will do their best with probes, but that best isn’t very good. No nonhuman race’s is. They all keep trying to copy from us, and never get it right.”
“Every species has its special talents,” Lissa interjected for shame’s sake. She wondered if Orichalc cared, either way.
/>
“Give me a figure, will you?” Valen snapped.
“An estimate,” Esker replied. “To start with, the collision will produce a stupendous gamma burst, detectable across the width of the universe. Nobody and nothing could survive anywhere near that. However, it’s known from theory and remote observation that this doesn’t happen at once. It results from the recollapse of matter hurled outward by the electromagnetic and other forces released in the encounter. The recollapse to critical density takes [114] two or three days. Meanwhile, yes, radiation background and gas temperatures will be high and increasing.
“However, our advanced protective systems can fend off more than most ships. The Susaians must have some that are equally shieldable. Integrating the expected radiation over time around the event, and throwing in a reasonable safety factor, I’d undertake to keep on station at a distance of two hundred million kilometers, for two hundred and fifty hours before the impact and maybe as much as thirty hours after it, depending on what the actual intensities turn out to be. That’s far too deep in the gravity well for a hyperjump escape, of course, but I’d call the odds acceptable.”
He spread his hands. “Granted,” he went on, “the whole reason for the exercise is that nobody can predict what will happen. I make no promises. All I say is, if I were the Susaian in charge, I’d post four live crews at approximately that distance. One each ‘above’ and ‘below’ the point of contact, the other two 180° apart in the impact-orbital plane. I’d put others elsewhere, naturally, but these four should have the best positions, if our theories correspond to any part of reality.
“And if I were that Susaian, I’d join one of those crews.”
Lissa leaned forward. She shivered. “When will the encounter be?” she asked.
“If we jumped now to the vicinity,” Esker told them in carefully academic style, “we would observe it in a little more than eleven standard days.”
“That soon,” Valen murmured into stillness renewed. “We barely made it, didn’t we?”
For Love and Glory Page 10
