by Wil McCarthy
“What?” Luna said.
He felt his face warming. “Nothing. Nothing! It would please me to drink with you, Luna Shiloh. Shall we go?”
“Uh, yes,” she said, frowning at him peculiarly.
PART THREE
EN TEMPO SENMOVIGA
Pretty! in amber to observe the forms
of hairs, or straws, or dirt, or grubs, or worms!
—Alexander Pope, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 1734 AD.
The bee is enclosed, and shines preserved in amber, so that it seems enshrined...
—Marcus Valerius Martialis, Epigrams, c 100 AD
Chapter Eight
Where before he'd had only a trickle of data, Miguel had lately dealt with a smothering flood. He fairly drowned in it, and still somehow he seemed to know nothing at all! Day after day, he sorted and collated, compressed and regressed and, with more than a hint of regret, deleted. Even so, the buffers had begun to fill up again. All Introspectia's data storage capacity lay in his hands, its allocation subject to his whim rather than the captain's. Not enough? Ridiculous!
The problem, then, must lie with him. He had failed, in some way, to make full use of the resources he controlled. Could Tech Aid Lahler help? At his suggestion, she had confined herself mainly to the routine task of filtering and tagging the incoming data, staying away from the subtler and orders-of-magnitude more complex task of analysis. A bad idea on Miguel's part? She did seem much more comfortable, much more at home with the link technology than Miguel. She'd grown up with it, he supposed, or at least with the idea of it. How ironic, that he should be charged with telling her how to use it!
“Lahler,” he said.
She turned, smiled, waited. Ever the eager and pleasant assistant.
Nice curves, Miguel thought for the thousandth time, and mentally slapped himself for the thousand-and-first. Another bad idea, one that just waited to get him in serious, serious trouble!
He scratched his forehead, at the itchy spot where link harness met skin. “I, ah, need some help with this. Conceptual help, I think. All this data surrounds me, and somehow I just can't seem to integrate it. This equipment... We didn't used to have this equipment.”
Lahler, Beth Lahler, gave him a pleasant, patient look. “You've done fine with it, Miguel. I think you just... hold yourself back a little? Just push it. Just push your mind right into it. After that, you can't not know what to do.”
“So simple,” he said skeptically. “I just 'push my mind into it.'“
Lahler shrugged, made an I-guess-so face.
Well, the time had certainly come for Miguel to earn his keep. Skeptically, almost jokingly, he poked and squeezed at his mind until it felt like a physical object overlapping his brain, and then he pushed it up toward the top of his head, toward the tangle of link cables harnessed there.
Amazingly, it took no more than that.
For a moment he knew thrashing panic, the shock of sensations wholly unfamiliar. Like falling into an icy stream! Of information! Of frozen frozen frozen—
“Steady,” said Tech Aid Lahler from the chair beside him. “I'll monitor, I'll guide you. Good heaven, what are you doing?”
“I can't—” he gasped. “I—”
And then, like a pond suddenly freezing over, his mind seized into a state of glittery, crystalline calm.
“That's it,” said Lahler. “See? Nothing to it. You should have told me before that you needed help.”
Miguel Barta did not reply, did not feel the need, just now, to reply. All at once, identity had shifted, expanded, changed. Miguel Barta had become thing-Barta, a piece of the seething group mind that controlled, nay that was Introspectia. And thing-Barta felt a sense of freedom, of power, for it knew in its heart that it could do, astonishingly well, the task that had been layed out for it. With link-born senses it sniffed and caressed and tasted the data, and, with greater effort, visualized it.
No more difficult than walking, this. No more difficult than sitting in a chair. Slowly, almost leisurely, thing-Barta turned its full attention to the instruments, and through the instruments to the Soleco hypermass beyond.
And... And... And then thing-Barta knew, with crashing, crashlike suddenness, an amplified and clarified and back-filtered sense of awe so achingly powerful it bordered on the religious. So close to the event horizon... Matter could not exist in that environment! Gravitational stresses would tear atoms apart, tear everything apart, leaving only the quantum electromagnetic vortices that theorists knew as “dots.” And yet...
“Tech Aid Lahler,” he said, in a loose and wavering thing-voice. “Have you continued to guide me? Do you see that?”
“Yes,” Lahler replied flatly.
Miguel shuddered a little. “Good. Good. I thought perhaps I had...”
“I see it,” she assured him, and even through the link harness she looked stunned.
At the event horizon of the black hole, the data revealed a group of ellipsoidal objects, tens of meters across and quite clearly solid. Against all sense, against all possibility, several hundred of the objects huddled right up against the edge of the darkness, frozen, unmoving.
Lahler's eyes locked onto Miguel, demanding answers, demanding leadership. “What do we do?” she said.
Miguel pulled away from the images, pulled his mind clear of the link, back into the slow and narrow and softly focused environment of the real world. Impossible. Impossible. Good lord, what would he tell the captain? “I don't know,” was all he could think to say. “I really... don't know.”
Run a full instrument diagnostic? Disengage from the link system and proceed with manual analysis? Have themselves declared insane? Damn, and damn again.
It was shaping up to be one of those mornings.
~~~
“You see?” said Dade Soames as Tom and Yezu got the airlock shut and started fumbling out of their bulky spacesuits. “Not so bad, really. Not so bad at all.”
Dade, first officer of this narrow, tube-shaped flying prison known as Wedge, had made it his project to mollify the two of them, to convince them that things were not really so bad. But now they had seen the centrokrist mine for themselves, and Dade's expression looked more hopeful than reassuring.
Tom unscrewed a glove, tossed it into a locker. Cursed when it bounced right back out and fluttered past him. He'd thought the gravity on this tiny planetoid a blessing when they'd first touched down, but in fact it did not do much for him at all. A twelfth, a twentieth of a gee? Not enough to hold anything down, not really.
“Your miners have not destroyed the deposits quite as thoroughly as we had originally feared,” he said, acknowledging Dade's point without concession or agreement.
Yezu simply pulled his helmet off and glared.
The Malhelan “fast” cruiser Wedge had taken three weeks to get them out here, nearly half as long as their trip from Earth had taken. A journey of mere light-hours, and yet so arduous! The ship's interior did not offer much space or comfort; Tom and Yezu had been crammed into tiny bunks, less spacious than coffins, less airy than the spaces under their beds in the vast (and private!) Introspectia cabins.
And the weightlessness! Gravity had varied considerably over the course of Introspectia's journey, but thanks to centrifuge management and careful trajectory design it never got below about a quarter gee. The Malhelans, with their tiny fusion engines, could make no such accommodation. Captain Biandi had encouraged them (actually, ordered them) to exercise their muscles. But he had no equipment for it, and so Dade Soames, quite the helpful first-mate, had shown them the memlukto (“self-wrestlement”) exercises used by the Malhelans themselves.
Much of it looked, Tom thought, like a kind of masturbation, though of course that activity was nearly impossible in these close and privacy-free quarters.
But the ship did not offer many other activities to those without duties to perform. Had they not found a chessboard, stenciled on the bulkhead in a shadowy corner and staffed by magnetic pieces that had to be m
oved by hand, Tom would have gone quite thoroughly insane.
Yezu, he thought, might already be insane.
“The tunnels,” Dade Soames said now, with a hopeful half-grin, “have been expanded only very slightly beyond their original dimensions. They really are very good indicator of the shape of the original deposit.”
“The empty tunnels,” Yezu snapped, heaving a boot into his locker. Like Tom's glove, it bounced right out again and skittered across the floor, out of sight. “The looted, raided tunnels we have come so far to examine.”
Dade sighed unhappily. “Did you see the remains of the core deposit, at least?”
“Yes,” Tom said, “we saw them. Yezu took a lot of readings, else we'd have been back an hour ago.”
“Readings,” Yezu said witheringly. “Yes. I see exactly how a sliver of a corner of an edge of the deposit lies within its matrix. How exciting. Yes, well worth a century's journey.”
Dade looked truly unhappy now, as he had so many times on their cramped journey out here. “Look,” he said, “I'm sorry. How many times do you expect me to say it? Captain Biandi was one of the first people to see the centrokrist, and yes, to plunder it. I was one of the first to make jewelry of it. It was wrong of us, yes! It was difficult to resist, but it was wrong, and we're sorry.”
“It doesn't help,” Yezu muttered bitterly.
Dade clenched his teeth for a moment. “Well, Doctor, I'm sorry for that, too.”
He turned and skated away, his feet sliding easily across the floor in the low gravity.
Tom shook his head. Dade Soames was aware of Yezu's problems. Damn, the whole crew was aware of Yezu's problems, and no one more than Tom. Yezu's wife, after remaining faithful to him for the better part of a decade, had divorced him and remarried. So her personality fax had informed Yezu, with simulated tearful eyes. She still loved him, yes, and dreamed of him often! But the decades must change her, wear away the personality Yezu had known and grind out a new one in its place. Too much time, far too much. They would meet, she said, when Yezu returned. Perhaps she would find herself once more unmarried, perhaps they would fall in love all over again. Or, she had said, perhaps not. Goodbye Yezu, hello Tom's Unceasing Headache.
“We have sympathy for you, my friend,” he said now to Yezu, “but everything has its limits. Dade has done a great deal for us, and shown a lot of patience with your naggling. It's past time for you to stop this.”
Yezu looked away, saying nothing.
Suddenly, a man in light gray fatigues appeared, skating up to them, stopping short with an expert skid. Techman Boyce.
“Doctor Kreider,” he said, pulling up onto his forehead the goggles that served as primitive cousin to a link harness.
“Yes?” said Tom.
“I'm getting wideband transmission with your name coded as recipient. It's the Introspectia, I think.”
“Introspectia? Are they still out at the Soleco hypermass?”
Techman Boyce shrugged. “I can't decode a point of origin. Most of the signal is wideband analog with modulations way outside audio range, and the digital part of it just looks like random bits. I'm wondering, is this some kind of encryption?”
Yezu looked up at the young man. “Probably they've sent a personality fax. You don't have those here?”
“We don't have those here,” Boyce agreed, nodding his head. “I have no idea what you're talking about. Can you show me how to read one?”
“Not easily,” Yezu said. The rage had gone out of his voice, leaving only a resigned, defeated sort of tone.
Tom once again felt a spasm of sympathy for his friend. Such an awkward fate he wrestled with, such a lose-lose scenario! Lose his wife on the one hand, or lose the opportunity of a lifetime, of ten lifetimes, on the other. It showed real caprice on the part of the gods, that the universe should contain such mischief.
“They probably have not left Soleco,” Tom said, “Or we'd have heard about it before now. Just beam a signal back there on the same frequency range, telling them not to fax. What... you just want banded multimedia?”
“How about a regular old holie transmission?”
Tom nodded. “Okay, just tell them that. I don't doubt they can arrange it.”
Nodding, Boyce raised his arm and checked a wrist chronometer. “Yeah, okay. Round-trip light time from here to Soleco is over four hours, though. Can you wait?”
“Of course I can wait,” Tom said, somewhat annoyed. He was no bouncing thirty-year-old, after all, and anyway no other option had presented itself.
“Right. Sorry.” Boyce ducked his head. Then, after popping the goggles back down over his eyes, he turned and skated off, down the long axis of the ship toward his station near the bridge.
~~~
And so, they fed Yezu's new data from the tunnel, and a little that Tom had managed to put together, into Wedge's poor excuse for a computer system, where it merged and melded with the data already there, information downloaded from the labs at Port Chrysanthemum. Then, they beamed the resulting mess back to Chrysanthemum, along with a request for updates as the data was processed.
That done, they dug in and began a little processing of their own.
Tom saw, for the first time, the brilliance and eagerness with which Yezu Manaka operated in this, his native element. Hypotheses spun from his fingers and lips, flying into the computer to be collated, assessed, accepted or rejected. And each time a new puzzle piece clicked into place, it seemed to kick Yezu into still higher energy levels.
“Look how these Penrose grains shear off at the tunnel boundary!” he exclaimed at one point. “Back up just a few microns and the structure seems unaffected. Flaws at interface less than one in seventy thousand, and the tesselation displays a fractality of well over two point six. Probability of natural occurrence?”
“Insufficient data to complete calculation,” the computer grumbled back at him.
“What has the fractality got to do with it?” Tom asked, feeling that his thinking, already five minutes or so behind Yezu's, had begun to lag even farther.
“It can't come together like this,” Yezu told him shortly. “The quark complexes should interfere. Left to themselves, they should interfere!”
It went on like that for quite some time.
Back at Port Chrysanthemum, the scientists had already gone over and over the quark complexes that made up the “atoms” from which the Penrose grains were “crystallized”. But the crystallization itself, the methods or conditions by which such a ludicrously complex three-dimensional structure might come together, continued to escape them. But now, Yezu seemed right on top of the problem.
Heavily “charmed” matter comprised most of the octahedral and tetrahedral grains, accounting in part for both the unusual gravitic properties and the echoes of pedial, triclinic internal symmetry. This much they had already known. Now it seemed another dispute had ended, as matter doped with “strange” quarks made up the other grains, the hex-needles and the irregular, polyfaceted “pluggers.” These pieces interlocked, almost perfectly, in a non-terminating and non-repeating fashion that gave the centrokrist its incredible hardness and toughness.
Individually, centrokrist deposits lacked cohesion, falling apart into small crystals (this word seemed inescapable despite its incorrectness), a few no larger than a poppy seed, some about the width of Tom Kreider's thumbnail. The bulk of them were more or less pea-sized. At the edge of each crystal, the myriad grains came together to form a flat plane. Truly flat, the “burr” between grains never more than a single atom high. That this should happen at all seemed remarkable to the scientists, Terran and Malhelan alike. That it should happen in such a way that each crystal formed a regular polyhedron... Tom had not really believed this when he'd examined the Malhelans' original call for help. Now, seeing it with his own eyes, thinking it through with his own brain, he still didn't believe it.
It was just bad luck, Tom thought, that the crystals came out of the mine so perfectly sized and shaped for
jewelry. A little larger or lumpier and the deposits might have been safe from depredation; in eighty years, no Malhelan scientist had yet been able to crack or crush or melt even a tiny sample. The Terrans, of course, had done so on their first day aboard Chrysanthemum. But not easily, no.
The edges of the actual deposit, inspected so meticulously by Yezu, proved now to hold charm and strangeness in equal proportion, along with more heavy “bottom” quarks than Tom would ever have guessed. And, too, more voids and irregularities, more and larger burrs on the crystal surfaces. So then, the “pink centrokrist,” or “heavy centrokrist,” must find its origins here. Nice to have a theory, finally; in their plundering days the Malhelans had never paid much attention to what came from where.
“It almost looks like a shock front,” Yezu mused as he stared at the holie display. “Like the “bottom” matter once resided within the body of the deposit, and then something forced it through to this edge.”
“Yeah,” Tom said, pointing with a finger. “Maybe they used to fill up these tiny voids here.”
Yezu sat up straighter. “Yes, I think... Yes! Tomus, you've got it! A high-energy burst of some kind could initiate quantum tunneling...”
It struck Tom, quite suddenly, how strange and beautiful the crystals really were. On the macroscopic scale, something like pearls, like diamonds, like opals. And yet, completely unlike these things. When examined personally, without the mediation of scientific instruments, they possessed a... an almost supernatural quality. Ghost stones.
Stranger still on the microscopic level, like a clever fractal display a computer might cast up in a fit of boredom. And, again, entirely unlike this.
