by Wil McCarthy
“Such beauty,” Yezu said, his voice low and breathless.
“I can't see!” A voice shouted.
“I can't!” “Neither!” “The window stands in the wrong place!”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” The steward said loudly, “Will you please be patient? Introspectia will continue turning for the next forty minutes. The view will continue to change during that time. If you can't see right now, you will see in a minute or two. If you can see right now, the view may escape from you shortly. Please wait patiently. Soleco will reappear through another porthole.”
Presently the hypermass, the puckering non-thing, slipped behind the edge of the porthole Tom had been viewing it through. Eclipsed, temporarily, from his view. The crowd continued to mutter.
“Such beauty,” Yezu said again. “My God. Thank you for dragging me up here so early. What a view we've had! This was worth all the waiting.”
And worth your marriage? Tom thought but did not ask. Worth a hundred years of your life? He himself had not been all that impressed with the view.
“I never did see a red halo,” said Jhoe.
Bustle and crunch in the throngs behind them, noise around the exits. Already, it seemed, some people had tired of the view, had now other activities calling out more urgently for their attention. Which made Tom wonder yet again what everyone did on this blasted voyage.
Here and there, some people still complained that they hadn't seen the black hole, or that their neighbors were elbowing or stepping on them. And from other heres and theres came sighs of awe and grunts of disappointment, as people caught their first view.
The puckering reappeared at the edge of the next porthole. Yezu sighed with awe.
“The next major change will occur in two hours,” The steward called out, “when the co-orbiting Lacigo and Malsato become visible. You will probably find that view more dramatic than the present one.”
“Let us keep these seats until then,” Yezu said quickly.
“I have to relieve myself,” Jhoe complained. “All this drink, you know.”
“Go, then. We'll keep your seat for you.”
“I don't mean now, just sometime soon.”
“Well, whenever you need to. Once Soleco disappears for good, maybe we can take turns.”
“Will you people quiet down?” somebody behind them snapped.
“I think we shall require more drinks,” Tom informed his companions, ignoring the voice from the crowd. “Big, silly pink ones with hats and straws and fog bubbling out of them.”
“I find considerable merit in that suggestion,” Jhoe said. He handed his empty glass to a passing homunculus, and waved for the attention of a steward.
~~~
Chief Technical Officer Miguel Barta peered, with eyes insubstantial, at the data his instruments were bringing in from the Soleco hypermass, and he cursed to see it. Something was happening, something he hadn't expected and, no doubt, hadn't been trained to cope with.
“Hey,” he said to his Tech Aid, Lahler. “These readings don't match the projection, not at all. Open more buffer space for the instruments.”
“None left,” said Lahler, her voice flat.
He turned and looked at her over his shoulder. A young woman, new, first voyage. And taking orders from him! She had a quick mind, and yes, admit it Miguel, a nice set of curves and a very nice face to go with them. Not that he was supposed to notice. But just now her appearance did not seem so nice, with the glazed eyes, the softlink harness sprouting cables from her head like Medusa-hair.
Miguel, also in softlink, shifted his cybernetic “gaze” into the data buffers and saw that she'd spoken truly. No margin in the buffer space.
“Damn,” he said. “Cut some loose from the engine monitors.”
“Already did that. And from the navigation backups. Really, Miguel, we don't have any more.”
“Then damn again.” he said. Without moving, he signaled the bridge for comlink.
Almost instantly, a face appeared on the holie screen in front of him. “Chelsea,” the face said.
Miguel had spoken with the captain, Lin Chelsea, several times before, and to his credit, he did not flinch this time. Like most of Introspectia's bridge crew, Chelsea had wiring that ran deep, portions of the link harness hooking in to penetrate her eyes and ears and nostrils. An accident victim, a humanoid robot partially disassembled. No cold, link-eyed stare from her, just the jumble of the sensory interface, less human than the face of a bug. And yet, Miguel had once heard her laugh.
Damn, these were strange times he was heading into.
Miguel's first mission would be called a “paperwalk” by some, just a flick out to Centauri and back on a diplomatic sprinter. Hardly time to get used to the ship, and barely a decade gone by in the outside universe. But the second trip, oh... He'd spent forever in the belly of a Priority Cargo barge, making the “third circuit” from Sol to Procyon-A to Procyon-B and back again. He'd returned to Earth forty objective years later to find things... changed.
And now, on Introspectia... A good job, responsible and variously rewarding: Chief Technical Officer! But this time around, he paid his price in centuries. Not yet to his hundredth birthday, he would return as a bleeding fossil. But a rich one, yes.
A remote scuttled across Miguel's console, its motion a blur of glittering eyes and legs. He stared as it ran by, fighting down the impulse to shriek and swat it with his fist.
“Did you want something, Mr. Barta?” demanded the thing-captain.
“Uh, yes. Yes. My instrument readings puzzle me. I need more buffer space to sort things out.”
“You agreed to the allocation schedules,” Chelsea said. And yet, Miguel sensed a slight expansion of his buffer space, a token gesture on the captain's part.
“Yes, Captain,” he said, “But I read something odd about the Soleco hypermass, a slight asymmetry in the gravity potentials.”
“Really?” The thing-captain sounded slightly interested.
Miguel leaned forward. “Captain, in a gravity gradient that steep we should see almost perfect symmetry. We're not dealing with what I'd call a large discrepancy, but the mass imbalance seems to run right up against the event horizon. Either my instruments have gone twidgy or I have to revise my definition of the word 'impossible.'“
“I see.” Chelsea said, her mouth curling peculiarly around the words. Miguel felt invisible tendrils probing at the edges of his data. “Can you offer me anything more specific? Are we looking at a science bonus if I cut you more space?”
A shrug. “I really don't know. I can't do much analysis with the observation data chewing up my buffers like this.”
“Can you guess?” A little more space opened up in his buffers, like a too-tight belt beginning to loosen.
“I uh, prefer not to,” Miguel said carefully. “I mean with only a few months' experience and all. But it looks... I don't know. It looks like we've got some mass concentrations down there.”
“Down there?” Chelsea repeated, now sounding genuinely interested. “Mass concentrations? You mean down deep in the tidal stress?”
“Yes,” he said. “Very deep.”
“I see.”
The captain's thing-face vanished from his holie screen, and in buffer space a door was flung wide, opening a huge portion of the ship's computing resources for Miguel to plunder.
“Good heaven!” he said, then turned to Tech Aid Lahler. “Triple our data rates, would you?”
“Already have, Miguel,” she said, and beneath her Medusa-hair she flashed a sickly and lopsided smile.
~~~
“Oh my,” Yezu gasped. “Will you look at that?”
“As if I have something else to do?” Jhoe said.
“Will you three shut up?”
The white dwarf, Lacigo, had come into view along with its collapsar partner, Malsato. Futility and Hunger. The dwarf looked small, as its title implied it should. It looked like a bright star, like the inner moon of Mars as seen from th
e planet's surface. Barely a disc, barely a shape to be seen in the pinpoint glare. The new collapsar did not pucker space as the other one had, or not as much. But something better to see—it sucked a visible plume of dwarf-stuff off Lacigo and drew it in, spiraling! Close in, the plume seethed with tones of orange and red, the primal scream of matter leaving the conventional universe, swirling into the shower drain of dilated space and time surrounding the black hole.
Unfortunately, Jhoe and the physical sciences had never really gotten along. He'd ducked them in school and ignored them in life... But here on Introspectia the physical sciences affected him directly, like a punch in the nose. Well, he supposed they affected him back on Earth too, but in routine ways he'd never noticed or thought about. Anyway, the ship's navigator had offered a Remedial Relativity course in the second week of the voyage, and out of boredom Jhoe had gone, and had really drunk it in. Not so hard, he'd discovered, once you got past the numbers and into the actual facts of the situation. Navigator Jones had told clever stories, with characters like the Relativistic Snake and the Telepathic Twins.
Jhoe had been particularly fond of Black Hole Bahb, who spent eternity swan-diving into the star he was named for. The closer he got, the redder and slower and more squished he became, falling forever as time slowed down and, at the so-called “event horizon,” stopped entirely.
Of course, Bahb, with the advantage of being imaginary, could do whatever he wanted, but Jhoe had learned that in the real universe, nothing of substance could survive in the contracted spaces near a black hole's event horizon. Tidal forces, like the ones the Moon induced on the Earth but millions of times stronger, would crush solid things to powder, then crush the powder to atoms, then crush the atoms, and the protons and electrons that comprised them, into something that Jones had called “quantum electromagnetic vortices” or, more simply, “dots.”
“I've got to capture this moment,” Tom Kreider muttered quietly as he stared out the portholes. “I've got to remember this forever. I could watch a simulation but it could never recapture the... the...”
Jhoe knew what he meant.
Together, the two stars formed a thing of beauty, like a pair of lovers alone on the dance floor. You could see the gravitational center between them, the point about which they both revolved, bathed in a glow of yellow-white light. No movement visible in the pair, but movement implicit in the sweep of hot gasses, like arcs of dress-fabric trailing breezily after the dancers.
Such a false, deceitful beauty! Malsato, with firm hand and unbreakable grip, was slowly crushing its lover to dots, and then devouring the dots. Jhoe had had a lover like that, once, an emotional hypermass about whom all things circled, and into whom all things fell, to be utterly destroyed. Shareen. Ai! A decade gone, almost, and still her name stung across his heart like a lash.
Never again. Jhoe Freetz, like Soleco, had learned to live alone in his cold and distant orbit.
I could really use another drink, he thought suddenly. He'd had many drinks, many more than he normally would. He was, in a word, pissed. So one more couldn't hurt him, right? Just a drop in the bucket. But when he turned from the window and looked around, he saw the steward had gone.
~~~
“And here at last, our destination,” Yezu said, pointing a finger at the porthole. An object—he hesitated to call it a star—had become visible there, a brown-orange ball that glowed dimly, like a piece of hot iron. Not a bright object , no, not bright at all.
“Vano,” Jhoe Freetz said beside him.
“I didn't think it would look that dim,” Tom Kreider muttered groggily.
Jhoe stared somberly out the porthole, a strange expression on his face. “They live in darkness,” he said. “Lacigo gives no more light than a full moon on Earth, and Vano gives off far less than that. The name Malhela means 'poorly illuminated.'“
Like Tom Kreider, Jhoe had drunk too much and had sunk therefore into a moody near-stupor. Yezu clapped a hand on Jhoe's knee. “You know a lot, my friend. Did the steward tell you that?”
“No,” Jhoe said, turning, looking surprised. “Yezu, I'm NAU's authority on fourth-wave colonies, particularly Malhela, Algonqia, and Nunuilakai. Didn't you know that? Why did you think I was on this mission?”
“I hadn't wondered,” Yezu admitted.
“Well, now you know it. While you gentlemen dig up rocks out in the debris fields, I will live on Unua, learning and studying the ways of the Malhelan people. With that dim little dwarf—” he pointed out the window at Vano “—as the sun in my sky for at least a year. Maybe more, if you all find what you hope to find out here.”
“It sounds like a fascinating job. The University must feel very lucky to have you.”
Jhoe turned, smiling unhappily at Yezu and at Tom. “Hardly. The place is a snake pit, no hope of advancement. Anyway, they don't have me anymore. We've been gone nearly five decades, right?”
A fist grabbed Yezu's heart and shook it, and he felt it crying tears of blood within his chest. Talina! Fifty years older now, fifty years more distant!
“Oh yes,” Tom said. “So we have.”
Yezu closed his eyes, opened them. Stood, brushing away the loose appendages of Tom and Jhoe. “Excuse me,” he said.
“What?” said Jhoe.
“I have to go,” Yezu told him, stepping away toward the exit. His grief had taken him, as always, from behind, unexpected and brutal as a daylight mugging. Always he would have these long hours of comfort, of ease and forgetfulness, and then... Oh!
“I have to go,” he said again. “I have to go.”
“What did I say?”
“Oh goodness,” Yezu heard Tom Kreider saying. “You haven't heard about this.”
And the voice of the tour-guide steward: “We'll see Vano only briefly at this time, so please get a look now if you want one. You may see it here again in approximately eighteen hours, during docking maneuvers as we arrive at Port Chrysanthemum.”
Tears were forming in Yezu's eyes, again, again. Surely, his eyes should have exhausted their tears by now? But Talina! She too had cried, for months before he left and no doubt for months afterward. But she had gotten over it, certainly, and had gone on with her new life which contained no Yezu. Her tears had dried up fifty years ago.
And with that thought, Yezu's tear ducts opened up for real.
“Haven't heard about what?” Jhoe Freetz was asking as Yezu slipped out the lounge's exit. “Really, Tomus, what did I say?”
Chapter Five
Jafre stared out his office window, stared out across the meadow as the park lights brightened, as Lacigo slowly dimmed and dipped below the horizon. Half-night: Vano still hung high against the stars, like heap of coal someone had shoveled up into the sky. Too red to read by, as they said, and too dim to dance.
“Mister President, are you even listening to me?” said the man on the other side of Jafre's desk.
On Earth, the meadow would have been green, dappled here and there with colored flowers. The setting sun would be yellower and much, much brighter than wan Lacigo, and framed in sky of rich blue. Here, all of it was gray and brown. Ugly, but still it was with reluctance that Jafre pulled his gaze away.
“I was hoping you'd left,” he said finally. “Would you care to? There's still time.”
The young man, one Rodgar Twidd, fumed. “Mister President, I'm quite serious. Unless those demands on your screen are met, to the letter, the Youth Coalition will picket the docks at Port Chrysanthemum. I'm sure the Earthers will be curious to learn—”
“The Earthers,” Jafre cut in with his no-kidding-now voice, “have better things to do than listen to whiny children.” He glanced down at the list before him. “Eliminate the children's curfew? Full suffrage at age twenty-five? Are you actually serious about this?”
Rodgar Twidd leaned forward, his eyes and nostrils flaring, fingers spread on the far edge of the desk. “Yes. We are.”
“'We?'“ Jafre leaned back and grinned humorlessly. “The
Youth Coalition is, what, about twelve people? I'm not exactly quaking in my shoes.” He touched a button on the desk, and spoke loudly: “Martin, would you send security in here, please?”
“Yes, sir,” said a voice from the desk.
Twidd recoiled, looking both insulted and alarmed as the door opened up and two of Jafre's guards hulked in.
“You can't arrest me,” Twidd protested. “I'm just speaking my mind. I've got the right—”
Four meaty hands grabbed him and hauled him to his feet.
“We can't arrest him,” Jafre told the guards in mocking voice. “He's got the right. Help me out, hah? Call this kid's mother.”
Now Rodgar Twidd turned bright red, and struggled hard against his captors. “Oh, come on! Mister President, come on, I'm not some fifteen year-old—”
“The Earthers have child activity laws, too, you know,” Jafre told the young man as the guards led him away. “Stricter than ours, I believe. I doubt you'd find sympathetic audience with them. And—” his voice dropped in pitch “—if I were you I wouldn't try it.”
“Darkness,” Twidd cursed, “we won't be ignored! You can't...” But he was out the door by then, and his protests faded quickly into the background.
Twidd and his cohorts would, in fact, be ignored. It seemed the only fitting punishment for their annoying him like this.
Jafre swiveled in his chair, looked out through the window again. But Lacigo had gone, leaving Vano and the park lights the only sources of illumination. Damn. He'd waited over eight decades for the Terran ship to arrive, counted the setting of Lacigo nearly four thousand times, literally counting the days of his Malhelan exile. And here he'd missed the last one.
