Second Genesis gq-2

by Donald Moffitt

  “Too bad your granddaughter can’t be with us tonight,” he said to Jao. “She missed the festivities last year, too; seems to me she ought to be able to alternate with other staffers in tree systems.”

  “Oh, Enyd? Don’t waste your time feeling sorry for her. She could be here if she wanted to. No sense of fun, that girl, She’s happier pushing her buttons. Sometimes I wonder if she’s really our granddaughter.” He clapped a hairy hand on Ang’s haunch. “What do you think, pet? Is she a case of mislabeled genes?”

  “Oh, Jao!” Ang exclaimed. “She’s just a little serious, that’s all.”

  “Here comes Smeth,” Trist said. “Rounding up votes, no doubt.”

  Bram looked across the torch-lit perimeter. Smeth’s gangling form could be discerned threading a route through the tables, lurching awkwardly across the tilted floor. A party of young constituents tried to detain him, but Smeth seemed distracted; he exchanged a few words, made a gesture declining an invitation to sit down, and kept coming.

  “Something on his mind,” Nen said. “And it isn’t votes.”

  “Now, Jao,” Ang said. “Remember you’re not on duty tonight. You said yourself that your deputy can handle anything that comes up.”

  Jao patted her hand. “Wild forces couldn’t drag me away.”

  Smeth stumbled the last few yards and loomed over the table.

  “Sit down, Smeth,” Orris said. “Have a drink.”

  “Uh, thanks, but I just wanted to have a word with Jao,” Smeth said.

  “I knew it!” Ang said.

  “Nothing wrong with the drive?” Jao said. “Everything working all right?”

  “The drive’s fine … uh … at least it’s coping with everything the core’s throwing at us.”

  “Oh?” Jao’s tufted eyebrows went up. He rose from his seat and steered Smeth by the elbow to a little distance away. Bram could see them talking earnestly, heads close together.

  Jao came back to the table while Smeth waited. “Look, I’m just going down to the remote bridge for a few minutes—we’ve got the one in this bough hooked up now. Never fear—I’ll be back in plenty of time for the turning. Marg, mix me up a libation.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Bram offered.

  “No … I’m just going to take some readings. Sit tight and enjoy the festivities. You too, Trist—no, don’t get up.”

  He rejoined the fidgeting Smeth, and the two of them left.

  Ang had begun a litany of complaint about Smeth. “…always dragging Jao off for some nonsense. Just because he lives for his work, he thinks everyone else does. I hope that when he gets young again, he’ll find some woman who’ll take him in hand.” Marg listened sympathetically.

  Mim asked Bram unobtrusively, “Why does Smeth look so worried? I know he’s a fusspot, tending his engines and guarding the sacred fusion flame like some kind of keeper of the mysteries, but he’s got Jao worried, too.”

  Bram told her about Jun Davd’s concern over the gas infall that had made the center of the galaxy a denser place than it ought to be. “Galactic cores are active places, but this one may be more active than most. More collisions between stars. More stars exploding or being ripped apart by tides and feeding the black hole. Smashed stars forming a soup that circles the hole at tremendous speeds, creating more turbulence, more friction, stronger magnetic fields.”

  Mim gave a shudder. “And we’re heading toward that?”

  “We’re bending ourselves around it at a safe distance. Smeth may want Jao to alter our trajectory somewhat, based on what he can deduce from the junk falling into our scoop.”

  “Is that what he meant by coping with what the core’s throwing at us?”

  “Probably. We’ve run into the fringes of gas jets so far, and a couple of minor storms of relativistic electrons.”

  “Storms?”

  “Caused by shock waves in the plasma. They accelerate the stripped electrons. Gives the ramscoop quite a diet.”

  “Oh, dear, I don’t like the sound of that!”

  “Don’t worry. The more energy that’s thrown at us, the stronger our fields are. The chief effect is the spurts of extra acceleration it’s caused, before feedback can compensate. You’ve probably noticed times during these past weeks when you’ve felt heavier.”

  “I thought it was old age delaying its farewells.”

  He smiled. “No. There’ve been some episodes of minor accidents and breakage that no one paid attention to. Fortunately, outside travel isn’t allowed without a tether, for vehicles or people. Otherwise…”

  “Otherwise; what?”

  “Somebody could’ve gotten left behind. Traveling at almost the speed of light in some heavy weather. Not that they’d know anything. The instant they left the shadow of our intake area—”

  “Please, I don’t want to know about it!”

  “Sorry. But as I was saying, the chief effect is extra acceleration. And that may have put us a few days ahead of schedule on our black hole flyby.” He hesitated. “I’ve been thinking about sending everybody to the trunk when the time comes, to wait it out.”

  Mim looked alarmed. “Will that be necessary?”

  “Oh, I doubt there’s any real danger. If we ever ran into something we couldn’t handle, the trunk wouldn’t be any safer than an outer bough. But while I’m still year-captain, everybody’s safety is my responsibility, and moving to the trunk would put us in toward the center of our umbrella, where the field is strongest, just while we’re swinging around.”

  He caught Trist looking at him from across the table. Trist compressed his mouth as a signal for Bram to shut up.

  “That wouldn’t make you very popular,” Mim said. “Everybody’s getting settled into their new quarters, unpacking and sweeping out rooms they haven’t seen for twelve years, and tomorrow morning the floors will finally be level.”

  Bram left it there. Across the table, Trist said loudly, “Who wants another drink? I think we’ve got time for one more before Leveltide.”

  “Look,” Orris said. “Here come the clowns!”

  Jao still hadn’t returned when the Bob began to swing.

  “Twenty … nineteen and a half … nineteen…” the crowd chanted in unison, counting the degrees as the bulbous painted shape followed the chalk line toward the bull’s-eye in the center of the Forum. Globular membrances lit from within by a coating of biolights drifted down, released from somewhere high above. Hitherto invisible sparklers were touched off, making a star pattern on the floor. To one side, the clowns were still gamely performing their skit, though nobody was watching: Two of them wearing twelve-foot body puppets were vying for possession of a papier-mâché imitation of the Bob, while three more, making a Nar with too many legs, danced around them, trying to make peace.

  “Where is he?” Ang fretted. “He’s going to miss it.”

  “Never mind,” Trist said gallantly. “I’ve saved an extra kiss for you. Jao’ll have to kiss Smeth. It’ll serve him right.”

  “Five…” the crowd chanted. “Four…”

  Bram could feel the faint trembling in the floor as Jao’s granddaughter, a hundred and fifty miles overhead in the trunk, began to cancel inertia in order to bring the Bob precisely level. He had to admit that she was an artist at it. In some previous years, before she had become tree systems officer, the Bob had been as much as three or four degrees off. Everybody had had to make the best of it—the clowns would rush out with a big, round target-painted rug and wrestle it into place under the Bob while people egged them on, and Yggdrasil would gradually be corrected over the next few days. But Jao’s granddaughter—he must remember that her name was Enyd—never missed.

  “Here’s to all you lovely people and another safe year,” Marg said, raising her glass.

  The Bob settled into place, swinging in a small diminishing arc that finally came to rest. More sparklers went off, and noisemakers raised a din. People were shaking hands, kissing, embracing.

  Bram felt th
e shudder.

  Others must have felt it, too. Around the arena there was a sudden dip in the noise level, then, as people decided they had been mistaken, things warmed up again.

  Trist was staring at the Bob, his eyebrows knit together. Bram followed his lead. The Bob had started swinging again, making a small ellipse that finally settled precisely over the center of the bull’s-eye once again and hovered there, trembling, only a few feet above the floor.

  “Your granddaughter’s losing her touch,” Orris teased Ang. “She usually gets it on the first try.”

  Bram and Trist exchanged glances. Orris had missed the point, and so had most of the others at the table and in the festivities beyond. The babble of happy ringside voices continued undiminished.

  It was not some small adjustment in the angle of radius that had set the Bob swaying again. If that had been the case, the Bob would not have returned to the same spot.

  No, something had bumped Yggdrasil here in the interstellar night. Something violent enough to buffet a planetoid-size object stubborn with relativistic mass.

  Bram rose to his feet. “I think I’d better—”

  And then the thing struck again, knocking him off his feet.

  Nobody could miss it this time. People went sprawling, tables overturned, and drinks went flying. Some reflex screaming was going on. The Bob swung in great pendulum arcs over the heads of the crowd. Some wall torches fell to the floor, and a few quick-witted people moved to stamp out the flames. The electric lights flickered, dimmed, then grew bright again.

  And from above, where the red-shifted light had been filtering through the lenticule, there was a sudden hideous flare as great snakes of fire flashed by and dopplered through the spectrum.

  Orris, white-faced, said, “What’s happening?”

  “Everybody better stay put,” Bram said. “There’s a lot of broken glass around.” People were milling around, but the situation seemed to be coming under control again. “Orris, you look after things here. Trist, I’ll need your help.” Trist nodded and rose.

  And then, suddenly, Jao was at Bram’s elbow, his forehead bleeding from a gash where he must have fallen against something.

  “Better come to the bridge,” Jao said. “Jun Davd’s trapped in the trunk, but I’ve got him on the fiber-optic link. And Smeth’s in touch with his black gang in the engine section.”

  “What’s wrong?” Bram asked.

  “The galaxy is exploding.”

  Bram stared straight ahead into a representation of hell.

  The viewscreen that showed the spectrum-corrected forward view was a smear of red-hot coals punctuated by glaring white intersections and eerie violet blobs that throbbed at the headachy limits of vision.

  At the center of the screen, a multicolored vortex of fire swirled around a tiny central blaze of eye-hurting brightness. Time was speeded up enough so that Bram could see the crushed stars breaking up, lengthening, feeding their substance into the rushing swirl of light.

  Another flattened whirlpool flamed at the edge of the screen, tilted just enough to reveal a similar blinding center. The second vortex seemed even bigger, more violent, than the first.

  The whole screen pulsed. At regular intervals of a few seconds, brightness swelled, the field of coals seemed to ripple, and a dazzling shower of sparks danced in front of the view. Each time this happened, Bram felt the floor beneath him shudder, heard the vast creak and groan of the wooden worldlet around him.

  “It’s not a literal view, of course,” Jun Davd’s calm voice came over the communications link. “It’s the entire electromagnetic spectrum done in visible light. But I’ve done it in a logarithmic progression, so you can more or less trust your eyes between blue-green and yellow-orange. Then it really starts to stretch out. In the blues, you’re seeing by x-rays. In the far violet, between four thousand and forty-five hundred angstroms, you’re seeing by gamma radiation. And those dull reds are very long radio waves. I had to do it that way so you could make some sense of the view. The dust obscures everything. But infrared gets passed from particle to particle, and some of the energetic gamma punches through.”

  “Thank you, Jun Davd,” Bram said. “You must have stayed up all night to do that.”

  Jun Davd chuckled. “I don’t imagine there was much sleep for anybody.”

  That was true enough. Bram rubbed at his grainy eyes with a fist. They were red, burning. All his joints were stiff.

  The others in the long, sweeping loggia that served as this bough’s bridge had suffered equally from lack of sleep. Smeth looked bedraggled, his salt-and-pepper hair sticking up in tufts. Jao and Trist moved as if they had weights attached to their feet, and Bram could see the weary, drawn faces of the people hunched over the monitors.

  Mim gave him a wan smile. She was still in her party dress. She had stayed here through the long night, making herself useful. Marg was here, too. She had put Orris to work cleaning up the shambles of the festivities, then she had gotten busy organizing hot food and drink for those on duty.

  The bridge itself was fully functional, with everything plugged in, though a lot of unopened cases were still shoved against the rear wall, and some of the equipment was dispersed helter-skelter wherever convenient.

  A great gout of incandescence leaped out of the screen. Bram flinched. It reached toward him, a violet serpent with a beady red and orange gut showing through, and writhed offscreen. Bram turned his head to look out the observation wall and saw a cross section of fire flash by, flaring from yellow to red in seconds. Yggdrasil gave a lurch.

  “What was that?” Bram said.

  “Jet,” Jun Davd said. “I’d estimate it at about twenty-five light-years long and still growing. It’s moving at about three-fourths of the speed of light, but of course it’s emitting a lot of relativistic electrons that are traveling faster.”

  Smeth looked around, strain showing on his face. “We swallowed some of the fringes. That was the bump you felt.”

  “What caused it?” Bram asked.

  Jun Davd’s composure was undisturbed despite the backhand swipe the cosmos had just taken at him. “It’s that black hole we’re heading toward. If you’ll keep your eye on it, you can see the process as it gets ready to toss the next one at us. The hole must be spinning very fast. It must have a very strange geometry—sliced off flat at the poles, but with the curvature of its circumference undisturbed. The gas and dismantled stars flowing into it would have a very strong magnetic field. You can’t anchor a magnetic field in a black hole, but some of the field lines would penetrate the accretion disk and attach themselves very close to the event horizon. Then it’s crack the whip—a million stars at a time.”

  “Why are we heading directly toward it?” Bram asked Jao. “I thought we were on a course that gave it a wide berth.”

  “We were,” Jao said, his face grim.

  “We still are,” Jun Davd’s voice said. “That object you see is not the black hole at the center of the galaxy.”

  “What is it, then?” Bram said, but he was afraid he already knew.

  “It’s another black hole—in orbit around the galaxy’s central hypermass. The black hole at the center of the galaxy has a second black hole as its satellite.”

  Except for those who were not able to leave their monitor boards, everyone on the bridge had gathered around the viewscreen showing Jun Davd’s display. Nobody was doing much talking.

  Bram stared, fascinated, at the flat, double-ended funnel of fire that was sucking in the stars. You couldn’t see the black hole itself, of course. You couldn’t even see the accretion disk. But you could see those whirlpools of superheated gas by the inferno of radiation they gave off as they fell down that cosmic drain. And that intense, tiny blaze at the center was where the condensed matter crossed the static limit and doomed itself to leave the universe forever.

  Jun Davd’s model of binary black holes explained a lot of things. It explained the rolling yawn of the satellite hole: that was caused by
the precession of its spin axis. And it explained those fingers of fire across the bed of coals: the satellite hole was sweeping out the rotating gas cloud of its primary. The geometry of space-time must be very complicated in there. Eventually the orbit of the satellite hole would decay, and it would fall into its primary.

  And that would make quite a splash! If anyone in the nearby universe was trying to prove the existence of gravity waves, it would make his day.

  “How did it happen?” Bram said.

  “The black hole may have been snatched from the Bonfire when the two galaxies met,” Jun Davd said. “That might help to explain why the Bonfire lost its shape.”

  Jao spoke wonderingly. “That would have been quite a meal for our galaxy to digest. First it nibbles around the edges. Then it reaches in and pulls out a plum.”

  Jun Davd cackled appreciatively. “The stolen hole would have fallen to the center, sweeping up stars and gas,” he went on. “By the time it took up residence as part of a binary pair, it would have been quite massive. We can assume, from the present remnants of the Bonfire, that its central black hole could not have been much more than a hundred million solar masses. However, the satellite hole appears to be three or four times that mass. In fact, I’d put it at a fourth to a third the size of its primary, which I now estimate at well over a billion solar masses—much bigger than I expected. Or…”

  “Or?” Bram prompted.

  “Alternatively, the orbiting black hole might have been born right here in the galactic nucleus—maybe with the help of turbulence caused by the passing of the Bonfire.”

  “You don’t sound very convinced.”

  “The dust is certainly thick enough and stellar collisions frequent enough to aggregate a second black hole of a few thousand solar masses. A single collision would be enough to start the process if the stars were massive enough to begin with.”