This time Travit was quiet longer. Captain Hargrove wandered around the engine room, looking here and there, now and again touching some piece of equipment. Nert sat as well as he could in one place because he knew if he began to fidget, he would wind up spinning like a dervish around the room. Herbie pulsed; as he did, his cell wall strained and slackened.

  Travit seemed to stay in one position for hours. The only things that moved were the quivering ends of his tentacles. He turned slowly from blue to a very pale green.

  At last he backed away from his children, and he flushed his natural blue again. His tentacles dragged limply on the ground. He coughed once, expectorated a small white puff of steam. “Well,” he said.

  “Well?” said the captain.

  “Well,” Travit said again. “This is all very embarrassing.” His voice faded near the end of the sentence and even his tentacles stopped vibrating.

  Nert sat back on his hind leg, and for the first time in weeks, his claws did not click out a worrisome tattoo. Herbie softened noticeably.

  “Why don’t you tell us about it?” the captain said.

  “Hm?” Travit snapped back from his preoccupied trance. “Oh, yes. Of course.” And he told Captain Hargrove all about the coelenteromorph who’d sold the Tumulship to Nert and Herbie.

  By the time Travit was done, Captain Hargrove was sitting on a benchlike piece of equipment. The captain said, “But how did you know enough to use the juveniles that way, and how did the kids find out the truth -about you two?”

  “Nothing to it, really,” Herbie said. “Once I found out that the telepathic circuit could be overloaded by extreme emotion, I figured I could use the same phenomenon again.” He looked at Nert and said, “Sorry I couldn’t tell you what I was doing, but if you knew beforehand, you might not have been afraid enough to force the juveniles to shake loose from the tractor beam.” He turned back to the other two and concluded, “The kids getting all that information about us from Nert was a benefit I didn’t really think of till later.”

  The room was brighter—somehow less ominous. The four of them looked at each of the others for a while. Nert felt slightly disoriented, as if he had just participated in a mystical experience; his defense had been spoken by the being who before had wanted his prosecution. Herbie’s silence, showed that even he was a little amazed at their success.

  Captain Hargrove coughed, and all eyes snapped to look at him. He said, “I don’t know about you, Mr. Travit, but I’m convinced these beings are innocent of all crimes. Not only that, I wouldn’t be surprised if the information you got from your children will lead to the capture of the coelenteromorph.” .

  “I’m sure it will, Captain. And I’d like to give them some kind of reward.” -

  “Herbie, my gerbis fund!” Nert said.

  Travit went on, “It will be deposited in your names on—I believe you said you were going to Mariondale?”

  “Right,” Herbie said.

  After everyone had exchanged thanks, and the pyram had gone back to his ship and his wife, Nert and Herbie followed Captain Hargrove back aboard the Gentaneplan.

  Nert saw Herbie’s cytoplasm shaking gently and he knew Herbie was chuckling to himself.

  “What is it?” Nert asked.

  Herbie said, “I was just thinking; Elglen didn’t hold anything back when she rejected me. If we go where there are other pyrams like her and Travit, I’ve got enough dirty stories to last me a lifetime.” He laughed again, out loud this time.

  Nert blushed a pale blue and began to click his claws together. Herbie said, “What’s the matter?”

  “T just thought. If you can tell stories on Elglen and Travit, imagine the tales those little kid power plants can tell on Droshii!”, “And you with four sexes,” Herbie said.

  Captain Hargrove said, “Kind of makes you humble,” and smiled as they entered the airlock.

  White Hole

  by Daniel P. Dern

  The snare drums whisper: Shbop-bop.

  Listen!

  The bass plucks out: Bop-shibob.

  You hear that?

  The saxophone calls: Tully-um, tolly.

  Quick, help me find that music! Where’s it coming from?

  Sounds like it’s down the street—dingy part of town, this. Such a dusty gray. But I’m getting closer, I can feel it. That door, that old boarded-up garage. I’ve found it!

  It must be. What else could coax those chords? How else could they create such pain?

  And if they can play like that, what might I learn, stranded in the graveyard downtown of Philadelphia, standing in the presence of that lovely white hole?

  I’d pulled into Princeton from Copenhagen, fresh from the Summer European Cosmology Conference. L. P. Remson delivers paper on Twistors and Spin; or, Black Holes Have No Hair, my latest, likeliest thoughts. Rested with my fellow physicists after a harrowing lecture at Oxford, and looked forward towards returning to the States to talk with Irranu. Affine connections, Kroniker deltas, Christoffel symbols; scarcely a daytime word of English or Danish in ten days. Somebody brandishing an umbrella, scattered reporters scribbling and taping, and a mindful of exhausted, unsorted memories.

  Black holes. Ever seen one? Of course not. That’s what they are. Nothing ever comes out: no light, no sound, no smell. The proof is only on the paper, and every so often the particle physics boys snicker. Black holes. Smaller than atoms, faster than quick. The great Siberian meteor was a black hole. And the fans go wild, as editors misshuffle facts. Friendly little singularities, with so much gravity they attract themselves into less than small, and smile as all spacedmic hell breaks loose.

  In the lounge after the third day of Danish beer, seated around cozy splintering tables and drawing diagrams in the salt, we heard this record. Some new jazzman, Canadian piano, with a strange sound that made you sit up and say, “That’s something new.” And play it again, and again, to let the rhythms soak in deep.

  Then I left Europe behind me, still tapping my foot, to brainstorm with Teodis Irranu on the golf-green lawns of Ivy League. His blackboard was hidden under a rainstorm of indices, and he said:

  —Look, I’ve got it. They can exist. White holes.

  No you can’t see them.

  A white hole is a black hole with the time arrow reversed. Things come out.

  My idle image Was a cornucopic singularity, mouthing a stream of golden elephants and crisp bright fruit and strange new objects meaningless to man. The cosmological horn of plenty.

  Wrong, all wrong. See Equation 5e. White holes spin. Things come out along the plane of rotation, yes—but only simple things, like protons, and neutrons, energy packets, information. Continuous creation: think of the Universe with a black hole at one end and a white hole at the other. Existence shuttles between.

  White holes create. They act anti-entropic. Ab nihilo, something new.

  —I want one— Irranu said. —How can we study these damned things without a sample?—-

  —Hey, Teodis— I said. —This is theoretical physics. We’re pencil pushers. Not lab boys. Let me see your scribbles once more.—

  —No— he insisted. —They do exist outside of my notes. Small, yes—or even smaller. How big is something that curls space?—

  I held my thumb and forefinger up.

  —Three centimeters?—

  —Too big, too big.—

  —How do we find them, then?—

  —Don’t worry, you’ll know— Irranu said. He picked up a small metal sculpture from his desk, a crumbled twist of flashing wires. —They reorganize— he said. —They thicken space. The mind quickens and makes new connections.—

  —So?—

  —Look for it, in ideas, in thoughts. Somewhere is an ingenuity beyond imagination, and all those who are near cannot help but catch fire from it. Things come out. Find them!—

  And I remembered the beer-scented sounds of Copenhagen.

  -—Teodis! That Canadian pianist! Do you think—-

  The man who played the harmony led me to a friend who beat the rhythm who heard it from a beard whistling in a bus.

  The poster had it, plastered in Denver and spreading like tsunami. The girl who did it had seen it scrawled on the back of a bookmark borrowed from a friend who found it in his suitcase when he came back from a convention weary-eyed and not knowing what he had.

  We thought that the new breakfast foods had it. But it was the packaging, and soon they left out the food and sold the boxes, until everybody but everybody owned one.

  Then the second album turned up, with bathroom acoustics rolling around it. Shbop-bop. Bob-shibob. The chase was on. Tully-um, tolly-ho!

  I caught a Greyhound from Princeton, cycled through Manhattan and wound back down the Jersey turnpike on the trail of a tape; Some combo in Philly, they had said at the record company. Local agent, box number, no phone. The agent wasn’t sure which group I wanted; I clutched a ragged list and scoured the city.

  The lighting inside was dim, but the huge garage was bright with life. Here it was. I had walked five miles of crumbling sidewalks and peered into too many places more deserted than dead. Philadelphia’s gloom pressed against me. But inside it was crisp, alive. The whole block had been abandoned. Windows sported holes and boards. All paint had faded. The garage’s name was almost gone from the wide wooden doors, and grease stains were the only remnant of a car-repair business. Names were streaked in the dust. My feet crunched dead leaves. But inside, something was happening. Things were coming out.

  Only the piano was playing when I walked in. The place had once been stripped and left to die. The artists had brought their world in with them, and it clashed. Mattresses. The piano. Boxes of books. Tables, chairs, groceries, bottles. Fresh canvases leaned against a low pipe. The piano gave off an unresolving jumble of chords, hunting half-asleep for the trail of magic. Nobody seemed to notice when I walked in; the score of motleys all stayed bent over their work. But they weren’t busy, they were waiting. Pencils hung at halfmast, guitar necks and clarinet lips rested low. Hands moved idly, loosely holding picks and palettes. Only the piano was playing.

  Then the air tightened, pinching at my neck. My body felt like it was humming, and my ears popped. I could tell they all felt it. Their eyes narrowed, their shoulders unhunched. The beginnings of motion whistled throughout the room.

  The bass man picked his bass from the wall.

  The drummer hit a soft, testing beat.

  The paint was on the brush, the fingers in the clay. Clarinet and sax swung from laps to lips, and there it was, Shbop-bop. Sallo. Tario.

  I was caught. The horn curled a note and moved it; somehow the clarinet swung next to it. The lump of clay shivered and grew. The bass ran a line from my throat to my stomach. Dazzles of blue and yellow erupted on the canvas, holding hands with patches of green. The music juggled me, melting me out and then catching my heart in a matched pounding that stomped my feet. They came together on an offbeat and stopped, let the sound ride silent and then caught the , current up again, nodding heads in approval and shaking off glistening beads of sweat. The sculptress moaned. The instruments caressed the music one last time, and then the players smiled through the pain all as one and let the music slip away between the fingers of a dancey tune. I kept tapping until I noticed it was gone. And in my hand was my pencil, scrawling on the table with a now-broken point.

  The clarinet man stood at my side. “Have a seat,” he said, jerking his jaw over his left shoulder. “Over there.”

  Next to the table and chairs a long-legged woman faced off her glistening-wet canvas. Colored dabs of paint showed on her once-white smock where her stringy black hair parted on its way to the hips. She had not stopped yet, but she was slowing down. Her brush created one final circle, and then her hand pulled back. She breathed out, long, and bent her head forward with sudden fatigue, “That’s what you came for, isn’t it?” The clarinet man was made of sticks, and folds of cloth billowed from his body when he spoke.

  I nodded.

  “What’s your thing?”

  “Cosmology.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m a physicist.”

  He snarled. “Get out.”

  “What?”

  He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. “It’s not that we don’t want your kind here—” Knuckles clenched white around the table’s edge. “But we can’t take the chance.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of losing it,” He put his hands on the table. “By understanding it,”

  I looked at the woman and the painting, the piano, the boxes. “I don’t see how that would do it—understanding. You’d be less a slave to it then. And … I

  want something from it too. Don’t you understand what it means to me?”

  Sad, and tired. “Maybe I do. But it’s not the same.”

  “Irranu—” I began.

  His matchstick arm unfolded a toothpick finger at his lips. “Shhh. Here it comes.”

  Still. I sat very still. I don’t know why, for my heart pounded and my throat hurt; I felt about to cry. A jarring chord came from the piano, beat, dying over the sudden attentiveness. The hand came down again, beat, and I knew the player approved of what he heard. Once more, to make it heard, and the saxman stood up. He blew a note. The bass made a quick plucked fourth, and pulled a tempo out of it like a child trying to launch a kite, running with the string into the wind.

  The sound caught in the air and held, then soared high for them. It fell, and our hearts stopped, then it caught, crack, like a parachute’s silk, and drifted slowly, while we dangled. And on the table, clarinetless fingers danced an unheard tune.

  “You see?” he said when it had ended. “It’s like that for all of us here. For anyone. You can’t take it away.”

  Suddenly he stared hard at my hand. My fingers, too, had been tapping; while the music moved they had plucked a pad from my pocket and traced idle tensors. “Liar!” he hissed. “Put that away, get out, get out!”

  “Ah, Remson!” a voice called from the doorway. “Good going! Come and give me a hand with the scope, won’t you?”

  All eyes went to Irranu. He made a dark silhouette in the doorway, backlit by the thin sunlight. My tinker-toy friend went to rebuff him, but Irranu brazened his way in, cradling a box and trailing wires. “I was worried I’d have to run this setup myself,” he said as he set the box down on the table and went to fetch another. “I hope it’s all here. I had the damndest time rigging this up. Did you happen to bring a pocket calculator?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Well.” His eyebrows dipped, then rose. “No matter. I’ll approximate. Here, see if you can recalibrate the scope—I jiggered it a little when I hooked it up to the gravity wave detector.”

  “Teodis.”

  “Right, and the chart recorder goes here, and now I—”

  “Teodis.”

  “Eh? Oh, that was stupid of me. Here, I have the tube in my pocket—didn’t want to break it. What does it read now?”

  I put my hand over the meters. “Don’t be in such a hurry.” I could see the artists closing around us in a circle.

  “What? Remson, we can’t afford to wait. I don’t think these things are locally stable.”

  Spin matrices did a jig in my head. Poof. Right he was.

  Matchstick spoke. “You guys better stop. Now. If you figure that thing out, you don’t leave. And if you kill it by understanding it, you won’t ever leave.”

  Right again. The scalpel laid down, the gloves pulled off, the open wound pulsing no more. Doctor, doctor, we know how it works. Show you? Oh dear, it’s too late.

  Would I do that? Could I do that?

  Matchstick stared at Irranu. Irranu stared at Match-stick.

  The air tightened.

  The circle scattered like windblown leaves. The piano plinked.

  The oscilloscope winked a squiggle.

  The rainbow-smocked paintress groaned and gripped her palette.

  The recorder whirred.

  All pawns, we faced off and cast our incantations, wooed our calibrations and spat our calculations. The enemy was forgotten in the fight. Click and strum, zee square why and one two three, two pi lambda and F dim 11. Things were coming out. The relays were chattering and the music divine.

  I shivered and sweated, scribbling, verniering. Tearing: the music, the knowing. I was caught. Irranu cried as he flicked switches. The horn’s blare was growing. Red dials made mad eyes straining at the leash. The drums beat them back. We were all caught in the twisting currents and rocking in the wash of things coming out, each striving to grasp what he could.

  Then nothing came out.

  And we fell.

  In the long loud silence that followed, Matchstick gave a wracking sob. He shook like a wet dog and knelt at one of the boxes. Irranu stared through the still-blinking lights. Bottles started coming from the box, bottles raised high and sucked at with emptiness beyond thirst. A twice-glugged bottle was handed to me. I caught it by the neck and raised oblivion above me. When I swung my eyes down from the sky, the room seemed to be shaking. The bottle moved on.

  I sat down, very suddenly.

  My brain was numb; in the void left by the white hole’s leaving was only emptiness and cold.

  Irranu, much smaller now, opened his mouth as if to speak. “I—” .

  Matchstick quieted him with a forelorn nod. “Maybe it wasn’t your fault.. And … it gave us all this …” The room rustled. “But there’s not much left after it’s gone.”

  I looked up. “Gone? It’s not gone.”

  They all looked at me. Where? I felt them ask. Matchstick stared the hardest. “Physicist,” he whispered, “Please tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I’ve got to work on it. With Irranu. With more equipment. But it’s got to be somewhere. We’ll find it.”

  Everybody glanced at the door. Outside lay Philadelphia, covered with the furniture of death. The battle was over.

  The chase was on.

  Back to Princeton, and away again. We joined forces. Labs, roads, and mountains. Hand-wired probes and ever-straining ears. I carried a guitar and Matchstick punched equations. We caught it once in Mexico, where Irranu wrote his sonnets. It winked away, and we ran again, threatening its life with a railway share, clutching for the things that come out. Please, help us find that music! Where’s it coming from now?

 

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