Collected Short Fiction, page 826
MY father used to joke that he was four hundred years older than my mother. He was Esteban Fenway, copilot of Ian Arkwood’s Space Magellan when they discovered NBH Draconis, the quiescent black hole just two hundred light-years north of Earth. Arkwood died there. Off the ship, exploring its tiny iron asteroid, he was caught by a radiation burst from something falling in. My father got home with the news.
The drama of his escape from its invisible gravity well is among my first recollections, as I heard it at the bedtimes when he used to trot me on his knee. He never tried to make himself the hero, but I loved the story for his genial voice and the strange magic of its relativity paradoxes. I always shivered at the terrible mysteries of NBH and loved the thrills of his escape alive.
“It’s a fearful monster, Sandy. A demon nobody can see. It has a terrible strength and a terrible hunger. It eats people and planets and stars and even the light that could show where it is. It hides in a great dark cave it has dug for itself.”
“If you couldn’t see it, how did you find it?”
“Its own dreadful power gives it away. Like your pocket lens, it bends light to magnify anything beyond it. All we could see was that little patch of brighter stars.”
“Will it swallow us?”
“We’re safe,” he promised. “So long as we stay away.”
“But you could go back?” I was always frightened. “And get there in no time at all?”
“In none of my time.” He liked to dazzle me with the wonder of the skipships. “And skip back again in another instant. That’s what we did. Our whole cruise, to survey half a dozen stellar systems and find NBH, took us just a few months on the Magellan, but four hundred years passed here on Earth while we were away.”
When I wondered how that could be, he said something I didn’t understand about Einstein and the relativity of space and time.
“No need to vex your little head about it.” He laughed at my fears. “Or about any danger from NBH itself. It’s too far off to touch us, and I got away without a scar. It was coming home that nearly killed me. The Arkwood expedition had been forgotten. Nobody wanted to believe a black hole could be so near. People called me crazy, and I did feel driven half out of my mind. Your mother saved me.”
I heard more about that from her. A journalist assigned to do the story, she found him in a bar, overwhelmed by an Earth that seemed stranger than NBH and drinking to escape more questions than he had answers for. With her at his side, he made the best of his moment.
She helped him set up the Arkwood Foundation and find funds to build Black Hole Station. Every other year through my childhood and youth, a new Magellan took off to carry supplies for it and relieve half the six-man staff.
Of course nobody returned to report anything. Nobody could, not for another four hundred years. I remember sitting at the dinners my mother used to give for the foundation staff and my father’s scientific friends. Listening to their talk, I felt baffled by the riddles of NBH and haunted with dread of its invisible power.
Schwarchild bubbles? Event horizons? Anti-horizons? Singularies? Quantum geometries? Negative matter? Negative time? Black holes, white holes, wormholes? What did the words mean? What dark magic let the black hole pull men off the Earth, not to return till all they had known was gone?
“Wormholes?” I asked my father once. “Are they really tunnels through space and time to other worlds?”
“Flying carpets?” He laughed at the question. “Not for spacecraft. Not even if they do exist. Tidal forces would tear your unlucky astronaut into superhot plasma, and matter that falls into the Schwarzchild bubble stays there. Nothing gets out except the Hawking hot-body radiation. And not much of that.”
“So what good is the station?”
“No way to know.” He shrugged, his bright blue eyes looking off beyond me. “No way for us, here and now. But I want to know what’s waiting for us, there inside the bubble. NBH is a natural lab with a trillion times more power than anything we can build here on Earth.”
My mother may have known how impatient he was for that knowledge, but I was stunned on the morning at breakfast, the year I was twelve, when he pushed his plate aside and looked across the table at my mother. He told her he was taking the next relief ship out to the station.
Her face gone pale, she sank back in her chair.
“If you have to go.” Her lips were quivering when she finally gathered herself to speak. “If you have to.”
Bravely, she helped him pack what he wanted to take and invited his friends to a farewell dinner. She had to wipe at her tears before she could kiss him farewell. My throat was aching when he gripped my hand and turned to leave, and my own eyes blurred at the eager spring in his step as he walked up the ramp to board Magellan Five.
“He loves us,” she whispered to me. “But NBH has caught him. It will never let him go.”
She took his place at the head of the foundation and kept the relief ships flying out. Over the years I met most of the volunteers when they came for training. All of them were men. She insisted very firmly that black holes were not for women.
Those men were a bright and lively lot. I admired them for many things: their abilities, their courage, their dedication to science. Yet I felt a sort of pity for them. Every one, in his own way, had suffered some painful loss. Disappointment in love, disaster in business, defeat of some driving ambition, failure of a dream.
“We’re all of us unhappy,” one of them confessed when I had bought him a farewell drink. “If we’d been content with Earth here and now, we wouldn’t be gambling our lives for the uncertain secrets of NBH. Or the chance we’ll get back to some fabulous Utopia four hundred years from now.” He made a bitter face. “The fact is, we’re diving into our own black holes.”
Wishing them well, I’d never wanted to follow. Yet I had never outgrown my longing to see my father again, or escaped my childhood fascination with the ominous riddles of NBH. Out of college, I came home with a degree in cosmogony, planning to join my mother at the foundation. She told me she was shutting it down.
“We can’t.” I felt dismayed. “Think of my father.”
“I do. Every day.” Her lips quivered. “But he’s had ten years at the station, if he stayed there. We’ll never know what he’s done or failed to do, but Magellan Ten has drained the last of our funding. This last mission will evacuate and abandon the station.”
“My father—” The decision seized me in an instant, “I’m going out on Ten.”
“I thought you might.” I saw her tears again, but she didn’t try to keep me. “Wherever you find him, still at the station or back on some future Earth, he may need you more than I do.”
There were just two of us on Ten; she had found no other volunteers. We met the pilot in the same bar where she had found my father. He was Colin McKane, a rawboned, hardbitten Scot who had abandoned his native heaths to scout a hundred planets and found none he cared to see again.
“My home, my family, all I ever loved—” Moodily, he sloshed another shot into his glass. “All thrown away in a crazy lust for new worlds and strange adventure. There’s nothing left I really care about. Matsu and LeBlanc were my last friends, fellow exiles from long ago. They went out on Nine. I promised to go out and bring them home.”
He shrugged, with a twisted grimace.
“If we can expect this wasted Earth to make a better future for us.”
Hiro Matsu and Jean LeBlanc. I’d known them in training. Both of them scientists of some distinction, they were both devoted to ideas science rejected. I’d helped Matsu load crates of equipment designed to test a conviction that he could reverse gravity by reversing the spin of cosmic anti-strings. LeBlanc’s project was to look for a way though the singularity, and backward in time.
“Crackpots, maybe,” McKane said. “But we can’t leave them there to die.”
We found NBH truly black, lost in the vast gulf created as it consumed the nearby stars. All we could see was the brighter patch of magnified stars beyond it. Nodding at them on the monitor, McKane turned uneasily in his seat to shake his head at me.
“Feel it?”
Even there, trapped deep in its unforgiving grasp, there was really no force I could feel. Spinning around the lowest safe orbit, we were still in free fall, the enormous gravity precisely balanced by the centrifugal force that held us there. Yet suddenly I was chilled by the recollection of a moment of terror in my childhood, when my father was tossing me high above his head and catching me as I fell. My mother heard my screams, sensed my fright, and made him stop.
That left me with a dread of high places. Now, even in the stable-seeming ship, I felt that was falling past the stars into an infinite and bottomless pit, with no support and no escape. A wave of sickness left me weak and cold with sweat. I had to grip the seat restraints and look away.
McKane grinned at me, and bent again to his flight computer. The asteroid was harder to find than the black hole. It had strayed away from the galactic coordinates Arkwood and my father recorded for it, and the starlight was far too faint to reveal it.
“A wild black cat,” McKane called it, “hiding from us in a big black cellar.”
Searching the spectrum for its locator beacon, he heard nothing. He made a dozen skips, with stops for radar searches. Earth was two long days behind us before a final jump brought it into searchlight range. A mass of dark iron a mile or so thick, ripped from the heart of some shattered planet, it was all jagged points and knife-sharp edges. We watched its slow spin till the dock came into view, a squat little tower jutting from a flat black fracture plane.
It showed no light. McKane called and got no reply.
“It looks dead. If you want my hunch, LeBlanc and Matsu found it already abandoned or dead. The safest thing for us is to get out now.”
“I came for my father.”
“There can’t be anybody here.”
“I’ve got to know.”
“If anybody’s alive, why don’t they have the radio beacon going? And a light flashing to show us in?”
“I want to dock and see.”
“A risk I was never paid to take.” Stubbornly, he shook his head at the telescreen, where a bright red star beyond NBH stared at us like a baleful eye. “If they’re gone, we’ll find ‘em gone. If they’re dead, we’d likely join ‘em.”
I persisted till he nudged us with the thrusters to overtake the tower and ease us to the dock. The station was tunneled deep into the asteroid, for whatever shelter it might offer. The dock was on the spin axis, where we were weightless.
When we were coupled to it, he turned to scowl at me.
“Are you sure you want to take the risk?”
Nervously, I said I did.
He slid a sleek little handgun out of a shoulder holster and wanted me to take it. I refused it; I had never fired a gun. He found a flashlight for me and opened the air lock.
“Watch every step.” He looked at his watch and waved an ironic farewell. “Whatever you find, make it quick. I’ll give you three hours.”
The door thudded shut. Air hissed. My ears popped to a pressure change. The inner door opened into darkness. Listening, I heard no sound at all. The air was cold and still. The flashlight found a switch, and light came on in a narrow passage ahead.
I caught a guideline to pull myself into the station. A bleak and cheerless pit, it had been crudely carved with laser blades into the rock’s iron heart. I dived along the guideline and stopped again to listen. Somewhere a ventilator fan whispered faintly. I shouted and got no answer. I saw no motion, saw nothing green. Sniffing for the odor of death, all I caught was dusty staleness.
The lines led me on to a radial shaft and out to a level were rotation simulated gravity. On my feet again, I explored an empty workshop, a silent kitchen, a vacant rec room, a long chamber filled with laboratory equipment, most of it mysterious to me, all idle and abandoned now.
On a big wall monitor, I found that magnified star, dimming now as it crept away from the focal point where the black hole hung, invisible, intangible, an eternal devourer of all creation. I stared and shuddered and went on down the tunnel. Doorways off it opened into what had been living space.
One by one, I looked into empty rooms. Abandoned perhaps in haste, they were cluttered with discarded boots and clothing, books and papers, bits of electronic gear, worn playing cards, a violin with broken strings, empty ration packs and dirty dishes, empty brandy bottles. I saw a bag lettered with Matsu’s name, a cap LeBlanc had worn, and cringed from a dread of whatever had driven them away.
Near the end of the tunnel, with only two or three more rooms to search, I heard faint sounds ahead. Squeals? Squeaks? Screams? I listened and crept nearer. Animal sounds, I thought, but not from any animal I knew.
They ceased. I heard a human voice, somehow familiar, yet aping those alien sounds. I tiptoed to the doorway and peered into the room. A gray-headed stranger with a wild white beard sat behind a long desk, looking up at a wall monitor and intoning that unearthly gibberish into a microphone.
Chessmen before him on the desk were set up in an unfinished game. Chessmen I remembered! They were carved of pale green jade and some jet-black stone. My mother had found them somewhere in Asia as a gift for my father. He had used them to teach me the game the year I was five. Swept by a tide of confused emotion, I had to catch my breath before I turned and spoke to the wild-bearded stranger.
“Sir?”
Jolted, he sprang to his feet, backed away, and stood for a long moment staring at me with deep-sunk eyes.
“Who the hell—” He blinked and shook his head and limped around the desk to meet me. “Sandy! It’s you!”
He looked far older than I recalled him, bent and shriveled but alert. He seized my hand, moved as if to hug me, but checked himself to stand back and stare again. “Your mother? How did you leave her?”
“Well,” I said. “She’s tried to keep the foundation alive, but she’s had to shut it down. We came to evacuate the station.”
“A little late.” He grinned through the beard. “The crew bugged out on Nine, two years ago.”
“And left you alone? How could they?”
A wry shrug.
“They tried to take me. Called me crazy. I had to hide in an old space suit till they were gone.”
I looked at him again. Haggard, unkempt, something bright in his hollowed eyes. I wondered what NBH had done to him.
“Your last chance to leave,” I told him. “The pilot’s waiting, not very patiently. He gave me three hours to find you.” I looked at my watch. “Half of it already gone. Let’s get moving.”
“Thank you, Sandy.” He reached to take my hand again. “It’s noble of you to come. Noble of your mother to give you up.” He shook his head, with a wistful smile. “But my work’s not done.”
“Father! Please!” I gripped his hand. “We can’t leave you here.”
“I can’t go now.” His seamed face set hard, he raised a shaking hand to stop my questions. “Sit down and let me tell you.”
He lifted a carton of ration packs off a folding chair, motioned me to it, and sat deliberately back at his desk.
“If you can make it quick.”
“Okay, quick it is.” Yet he paused for a moment, staring at the chessmen, before he shrugged and went on. “I’ll skip over my first years here. Pretty much what you might expect. We studied what there was to study. Measured NBH for mass, electric charge, spin. Studied the orbits of captured objects. Looked for the Hawking radiation.”
“So?” I had to humor him. “What did you find?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged. “Nothing really new until after Three had come and gone. But I stayed and kept at it till I got what I call my eureka moment.”
“What was that?”
“A revelation.” He glanced away at the end of the room, where I saw an easel under a paint-splotched cover, and paused for a long sigh. “It happened during my search for the radiation. A quest I had almost given up. If I’d left on Nine—”
He shook his head and stopped again to glance at his unfinished chess game, long enough to let me wonder about his opponent and to wonder how sane he was.
“Black holes decay,” he went on abruptly. Hawking did the math. I’ve found the evidence. And established a new principle of physics.” He sat straighter as if to challenge me with it. “The conservation of information.”
He scowled when I peered at my watch.
“The decay process is slow, the radiation feeble, with no distinctive spectral signature. It took me two years and a new antenna to pick it up. A faint hum, often drowned in thunder from the accretion zone. Nothing exciting till I got the signals it carried.”
“Signals?”
“Information!” He saw my disbelief. His old voice went shrill. “Clicks in my headphones. Three clicks. A pause. Three more clicks. Another three, till there were twelve. A longer pause. Then they began the series again. I answered with echoes and got a reply. A pattern of clicks and pauses that made pixels for simple graphics, twelve by twelve. A circle. A square. An equilateral triangle. A diagram to show the hypotenuse as the sum of squares.
“Contact with intelligence!” His hollowed eyes lit. “We’ve invented a common language, good for math and science, though so far we’ve found no Rosetta stone for the humanities—”
“We?” I had to interrupt. “Who?”
“A question.” He seemed amused at my bewilderment. “I don’t know who or where or even when. I’m still searching for the answers. The signals do come out of the Schwarzchild bubble, carried on the Hawking radiation. They may originate in the central singularity. They may come through it. They may come around it.”
