by Wil McCarthy
“Ready to unmoor,” Peng said. “Everybody hold on tight. Blowing the clamps in five... four... three... two... here we go!”
Miguel jerked in his harness at the loud banging noise the clamps made as they let go, then jerked again as the lander kicked away from Introspectia. And fell! Miguel's stomach fluttered, weightless and empty. The viewports, no longer nestled against the lander's mooring cavity, came alive with light and motion, the bright image of Introspectia, its navigation lights ablaze, falling rapidly away from them into a sky washed pale with starlight and white-dwarf haze.
“Wheeee!” said First Mate Peng. “I haven't done anything like this in a long time!”
Miguel, dizzy and nauseated and frozen with terror, said nothing. Nor, he noted, did young Lahler, her courage apparently fled.
Introspectia dwindled rapidly, becoming a festively-lighted toy, and fell off to the side as it dropped behind the (now lower and, consequently, faster) lander in its orbit. Too quickly, it slipped toward the edge of the lander's broad fore-viewport, and then past the edge and out of view.
“Rotating to burn attitude.”
Behind the haze of Lacigo's stolen gasses, the stars, already wheeling with the alarming speed of the lander's orbit, began to spin even faster. Miguel pulled his eyes away, looked down at his fixed, non-wheeling, non-terrifying science monitor. Ah, yes, the sight of it reassured him. No link harness, here, just a holie screen piping numbers and graphs from the various instruments the lander had been fitted with. Peng had, apologetically, referred to the whole thing as a “hasty and awkward assemblage, unfit for such duty as this.”
But in truth, it resembled the science equipment Miguel had used for most of his life, in the relativistically distant days before Introspectia. Subjectively, no more than six months ago!
“Lander,” said the voice of Lin Chelsea, “Report your status.”
“Doing fine, Lin!” the First Mate called out cheerfully. “Preparing to fire circularization burn.”
Already? Lord! Miguel's eyes darted over the science monitor, pulling data off here and there. Indeed, their orbital period had plunged to 29 seconds upon their release, and periapsis had come upon them once again. He had a hard time remembering how fast their orbit here really was.
“Firing now.”
Miguel's weightlessness went away, a comforting acceleration taking its place. A third of a gee? Yes, 0.314, the instruments confirmed it. He turned his head, looked over to see how Beth Lahler fared just now.
Not too well, apparently; her face had gone instantly puffy with the loss of gravity, and the puffs were sagging, now, as the fluid looked for a place to go. Her tight mouth and slitted eyes, her hands in deathgrip on the seat's arm rests, bespoke deep terror on an instinctual level. Fear of falling, fear of darkness. Fear of falling into darkness.
I told you not to come, Miguel said to her with his eyes.
“Engine cutoff,” said Peng. The acceleration eased, vanished. “Next burn in twenty seconds.”
“I'll get by,” Lahler croaked. Her face, in addition to its other obvious discomforts, had begun to go a little green.
“You don't look like it,” Miguel said.
She shot him an ugly glare. “Shut up.”
Colors shifted, darkened.
Miguel looked up sharply, saw what lay outside the forward viewport. Yellow surrounding orange, and fading to a tiny dab of red in the middle, like a bullseye seen out of focus. The Malsato hypermass. So small, so trivial in appearance; no larger than a grapefruit held at arm's length, and not much brighter than a camp fire. Even close enough to shake and sicken them with its gravity, it did not look like much.
He saw, of course, not the tiny hypermass itself, only twenty-nine kilometers across, but the light emitted from the dense Lacigo-haze immediately surrounding it. Pure, white light, like that of the dwarf star itself, but whose wavelength had been stretched by the wearying climb out of Malsato's gravity, so that it appeared yellow, or orange, or, nearer the edge of the event horizon, a dark and malevolent red.
Even much closer, though, he knew he couldn't see the actual collapsar. Emitting no light, consuming the light that touched it, and bending the rays that brushed close by. The Lord's own telescope lens. The very close rays would bend a full 180 degrees around, swinging back to the direction they came from.
Even at fifty meters altitude, the ellipsoids could never see the object they orbited. What would they see? A nightmare Bosch-Escher world of gravity-lensed double images, false images, images distorted beyond all recognition? A scream of blueshifted light falling in from the outside universe? They would need something like the softlink, something like the obediently fractured mindlets of thing-Barta, to make any sense of it. If the very attempt did not drive them to blindness and madness and worse!
The view outside the lander continued to wheel sickeningly by. The hypermass slipped from view, replaced by cold stars and pale haze.
“Next burn in five seconds,” said First Mate Peng. “Three. Two. One. Firing.”
The acceleration returned, and Miguel's stomach lurched for the hundredth time. No carnival ride had ever jerked him around so much, spun or disoriented him so completely. Damn, damn, why had he ever agreed to do this?
Something on the science monitor caught Miguel's eye. Something...
“Stop the burn!” he shouted.
Instantly, unquestioningly, Peng slammed his fist down on a button. The thrust died. He turned, looked hard at Miguel. “What happened?”
Miguel, his eyes still riveted on the screen, waved a hand at him. “Wait... okay, we've passed them. Remember that our periapsis lies right on the ellipsoids' orbit, but we pass through it with a velocity much higher than theirs.”
“Do you mean we almost had a collision?” Peng asked, his face a mask.
Miguel shrugged. “Well, we came within a few kilometers of one of them. Considering our relative velocities, I didn't feel comfortable with that.”
“I didn't see anything,” Peng said. Not skeptically, but rather with regret.
“You will,” Miguel assured him. “I don't doubt it.”
Malsato swung into view again, washing them in yellow-orange light.
Lahler squirmed in her seat. “Miguel, I can't read these instrument displays. Just numbers and colors and lines! How do you read it? How can you tell where the ellipsoids are?”
“Relax,” Miguel reached out to place a reassuring touch on Lahler's shoulder... but he groaned and pulled his hand back before doing so. Vertigo! Vertigo! Oh, Lordy!
Gravity gradient pressed his rear into the seat with considerable force, now, almost a gee. Now less... now less... Now increasing again... But the unseen forces pulled considerably harder on his feet, and less hard on his upper torso. His head, apparently higher than the lander's center of mass, was paradoxically pulled upward. Well, a little forward now, too.
Though weightless, suspended between the forces of Heaven and Hell, his outstretched arm had felt little tugs in every direction, like strings glued to his skin, pulling lightly outward. As if, given time, his arm might swell and burst like a sausage left too long in the cooker. Piled on top of the rotation and the other forces twisting Miguel's guts, the feeling had blown his equilibrium, spun him off into mindless horror for a brief, falling-nightmare moment.
Now, he cleared his throat, tried to look relaxed. “Damn, that feels weird. Keep your hands in close, I think you want to avoid that. In fact, keep your body as small as you can.” He tried to smile, felt that it didn't quite work. He left it on anyway—this woman deserved a smile at a time like this!
“Beth, a lot of people have done a lot of good work on equipment like this. Some of them not so quick on the uptake, you know what I mean? Try to relax. This thing in the upper right hand corner—” he pointed at his own screen rather than hers “—is the tracking display. Radar, lidar, passive optical and gravimetric. At the center of it here is our lander—”
“I'm skipping the peri
apsis burn!” Peng called out.
“Okay,” Miguel said back to him. “Don't skip the next one, though, we need it to avoid contact on the next pass.”
“Avoid? This mission it not about avoiding contact.”
“Damn it, Peng, you know what I mean. Smashing into them at five kilometers a second won't help!”
“I see the tracking display,” Lahler said, pointing at her holie. “But I don't get all this stuff on it, up here.”
He nodded, pointed at his own screen. “The radar and lidar beams don't bounce back from the hypermass, except for the fraction that get turned around at the event horizon. I think our sensors can actually look their own selves in the eye. And not understand what they see! Anyway, don't pay attention to anything past about here. A lot of what you see there will be ghost images.”
Yes, he felt he could almost grasp it now. An object close by would project two images: one very near its actual position, and the other, coming the long way around the black hole. A distorted ghost over Malsato's shoulder, many light-seconds away and many time-seconds out of date. And an object actually perched in that position behind the hypermass... would it produce a clear ghost that hovered nearby? No, certainly, it would produce a scattered image, enormously magnified, perhaps spread out to the point of invisibility.
Well, never mind that. It confused him, and it would confuse Lahler if he tried to explain it, and neither of them could afford confusion right now.
“Just worry about the close images,” he said, “in this area here.”
“Okay.” She nodded once, calmer now with something to focus on.
“I'm firing the periapsis burn!” Peng said.
Oh, damn. Miguel tightened his muscles as the acceleration squeezed at him again. At least thrust acceleration came all in one direction, didn't pull on him in directions he wasn't meant to bend. Still, he didn't like it.
Lahler cried out, as if in pain. Miguel turned quickly (dizzyingly! nauseatingly!) toward her, and saw her face contorted with wonder, not pain. She looked out the forward viewport.
He followed her gaze. Outside, ahead, down below them hung an object the size of a pebble. Sparkly-white, like a centrokrist. But egg-shaped. It moved away from them, shrinking, blending with the haze. The edge of the viewport swung around to cover it before it had disappeared completely.
“Good Lord,” Miguel said quietly.
Peng sat riveted. “Oh my. Oh my.”
The periapsis burn terminated. Gravity gradient tugged and pulled, stronger than ever.
“Lander,” said the faint voice of Lin Chelsea. “Rep.. y...”
“I'm sorry,” Peng said into the panel, his voice soft. “I didn't catch that.”
“Report your status.” The captain's voice was clearer now, louder, slightly higher in pitch.
“We, ah...” Peng paused, tilted his head over and scratched it. “We made visual contact with an ellipsoid, Captain. Gone now, but we looked right at it. We looked right at it, an alien machine. An alien spaceship. About twenty kilometers away?”
He looked back at Miguel questioningly.
“Eighteen point four,” Miguel confirmed. His skin tingled. His pulse pounded loud in his ears. Alien spaceship. We have made visual contact with an alien spaceship.
For an instant, he was back on Earth, at the Merchant Academy. Parked in a glossy gray desk, with Captain Professor Pence leaning over him. “And what would you do, Mr. Barta, upon visual contact with a spaceship of alien manufacture?” Miguel smirked. “Offer them a beer, sir.” Laughter. The sound of Pence's crop slapping hard against the desk...
“...approximate position of the...” Chelsea's voice had dropped in pitch again, and faded. A few seconds of silence, and then, “...in line... we expected?”
“It has gone now, Captain,” Peng said, not seeming to mind that he hadn't heard the question.
A pause. “Proceed with your descent, Mr. Peng, and rendezvous with one of the ellipsoids. Advise us when you have reestablished contact.”
I want you to get co-orbital with one of them, Chelsea had instructed them before their departure. Maybe half a kilometer ahead, and then take over the prime number transmissions from us. Flash your navigation lights at them, too, in synch with the prime signal. We intend to introduce ourselves, no? If anything sentient lives in the object, I want you to make sure it understands this fact.
Fairly straightforward. Right out of the manual, in fact, in an almost literal sense. In the implementation, however, these orders seemed rather more complex, and certainly a lot less desirable. Nothing seemed easy or familiar down here.
Yellow and orange, the Malsato hypermass rolled in and out of view again, faster than ever.
“Understood, Captain. Crewmates, prepare for periapsis burn.”
“Prepared,” Miguel said with some annoyance. As if he and Lahler, dizzy and sick and twisted by gravity, had anything left to prepare.
The burn fired. Acceleration vectors danced and quivered and inflicted discomfort. Patterns shifted on the science displays. The burn ceased.
Peng started banging out a quick sequence on the controls. “Tech Chief Barta, please select an ellipsoid for us to rendezvous with. Please design a final periapsis burn to match our orbit with its own, approximately one kilometer ahead. Please feed this information through to the helm.”
“Acknowledged,” Miguel said. Stretching his arms out for the controls brought new dizziness and discomfort, forces trying to lever him up out of his seat, and he dealt with these feelings in silence. Trajectory design... Lordy, it felt weird to do this again with the old equipment. But not too terribly difficult, no. In moments he had the information Peng had requested, and with a flourish he brought his hand down on the XFER and NAV tabs, transferring the maneuver to the lander's helm system.
“Completed.”
Lahler looked over at him, smiled vaguely, then turned back to her science display. Her face dropped back into a frown of concentration as she tried, clearly, to reconstruct what he had done, and the method he had used, and the precise effect it would have when all was said and finished.
“Acknowledged,” said Peng. “Rotating to new burn attitude.”
The stars and vapors wheeled by as they had done, and the gravity gradient pulled as before. Miguel had computed a small maneuver, less than ten degrees of arc, and he could not perceive it now in the dizzying wash of background sensation.
Malsato's glow came and went.
“Prepare for final periapsis burn.”
“Prepared!” Miguel snapped.
“Prepared,” Lahler echoed, but with a ring of anticipation rather than Miguel's anger.
Yes, he should take this cue from her and calm the hell down. When had she gotten calm? How had she gotten calm? In seconds they would rendezvous with an alien spaceship in the murky depths of a black hole.
“Firing burn.”
Higher thrust this time than ever before. Parts of Miguel's body strained against six gee's or more, while other parts remained sickeningly feather-light.
“Here we go, crewmates!” Peng called out over the hum of engines. “Settling into nose-down attitude. Prepare to get stretched!”
Rotation, and oscillation. The forces churning Miguel's body doubled, almost. Yuck! Uncomfortable! But really, not as bad as all that. Given time, he could probably get used to it. But how much time? How long would they—
An object, thumb-sized and glittery white, swung into view, wandered for a moment, then settled to a stationary position near the center of the forward viewport. Its long axis, a little over 100 meters long, pointed straight down, aligned with Malsato's gravity gradient. The short axis was about half the length of the long, so that the object looked very much like the egg of a quail or other small bird.
An alien machine. An alien spaceship.
The hum and pull of the engines died away, leaving only the hiss of ventilators and the soft chunk-chunking of the attitude control jets. Miguel checked his panel, saw that t
heir new orbit lay right atop that of the ellipsoid.
“Rendezvous achieved,” he said, in a voice that had once more attained some measure of professional calm.
“Acknowledged,” said Peng as he worked more controls. “Captain Chelsea? We have rendezvoused with one of the ellipsoids. Preparing to initiate prime number transmissions.”
The captain's voice came back staticky and faint: “...please repeat... ge... didn't receive all of that.”
“I said we made it,” Peng shouted into the holie. “Shall we start transmitting?”
“Acknowledged, lander.” Her voice clearer now. “Yes, begin prime number transmission.”
Peng looked over his shoulder at Miguel. “Mr. Barta, please initiate a wideband prime number transmission, with synchronized strobing of the navigation lights.”
Miguel nodded to show that he had heard, then turned to Beth Lahler. “Tech Aid, would you do the honors?”
Lahler gaped at him for a surprised moment, then looked down at the science displays in front of her, then back at Miguel again. Her expression hardened into a sort of professional scowl. “Of course, sir.”
She turned, hunted on her panel for a few seconds, then started working controls. She looked as if she'd never used her hands before, as if they were themselves alien objects of mysterious origin and purpose. But she operated them with reasonable skill, finding and activating the functions she wanted. Soon, the lander was sending its signal to the alien ship.
Beep! BeepBeep! BeepBeepBeep! BeepBeepBeepBeepBeep! BeepBeepBeepBeepBeepBeepBeep!
And also Flash! FlashFlash! FlashFlashFlash! Running through all the prime numbers between one and 997, all the integers which could not be divided by any other integers (aside from the number one) and still leave an integer result. No natural phenomenon could produce a signal like that, so conventional wisdom had long maintained that sentient, technological aliens, if they existed, would instantly recognize such a signal as the work of another intelligence.
Miguel had always doubted conventional wisdom, on that point and on many others. How could anyone know what sentient aliens would or would not think? And anyway, the lander itself presented far clearer evidence of intelligent origin. Anyone who mistook it for a natural object could not, in Miguel's opinion, be classified as sentient!
