by James Welsh
***
Latch was standing at the balcony of her office. From where she stood, Latch saw that the colony was chaos with celebration. The people were free from the black hole and the charter and they didn’t know what to do first – and so they did everything at once. The rock below was alive with dancing and singing and crying and laughing. For a moment, Latch thought of enforcing the nightly curfew, but laughed. She wasn’t going to take this night away from them.
But the celebration was fragile enough that Martinique’s voice shattered it for Latch.
“You honestly thought you could admit the truth and walk away from it?” Martinique demanded.
Latch turned slowly and faced her accuser. As she stared through the open door into her office, she saw nothing at first but darkness. At first, she wondered if her guilt had learned how to speak, and she wondered if this was the beginning of insanity. But then the shadows rippled, and Martinique stepped into the light thrown against the balcony.
Latch started to say something, but then she realized that she had no defense. And so she stayed silent as Martinique continued. “When you found out that Chief Armfelt was hunting down Khunrath for the charter, you killed him. You destroyed a good man all because he was following orders. I should have realized it then, when you blocked the investigations. But I refused to believe it, that a woman of the law could be such a criminal.” As Martinique spoke, he had hungry eyes, a wolf’s eyes.
“I did what was right,” Latch said softly. “The charter is trillions of miles away – the only power they have over us is in our imagination. Khunrath is not only my friend, but he is close – I’ve been close enough to see him smile and to feel his hug. My friends are more real to me than the charter ever was.”
“The charter’s closer than you think,” Martinique sneered in the way that only he could. He tapped his chest. “I represent the charter, because somebody has to.”
Latch laughed. “You’re damn right you represent the charter, and you should be ashamed of that.”
“So says the person who broke their promise!” Martinique suddenly exploded. “You swore in an oath that you would keep the order, and what do you do? You can’t be two things at once – you can only be a criminal or the law. Which one are you going to be?”
Latch didn’t give an answer, and so Martinique spoke for her. He grabbed Latch by the hand and took something out of his pocket. Whatever it was, he dug it into Latch’s hand and buried it with her fingers. She looked down and saw that he had given her a dart from the armory. The dart was thick with an orange serum that glowed through the glass. Immediately, she knew what the poison did: it immediately destroyed a person’s immune system so that anything, even something as simple as a scratch or a cold, could kill them. The longest someone lived after being shot with that dart was a few days, and they spent that time in fear of everything.
“If you’re still one of us,” Martinique said, “you’ll do what is right and kill the criminal. Just think of it this way – this is your chance to redeem yourself for what you’ve done.”
“And what if I say no?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I’ll make you regret every inch of your life. So what’s it going to be?”
Latch looked down at the dart and then up at Martinique. She was quiet for a few seconds, her face a statue. Suddenly, she did what was the right thing to do, because that was all she knew.
***
In the oceans of space, the black holes are the whirlpools. Like the maelstroms on Earth, the drains that are scattered like marbles across cold space are worse than death. The inescapable pull of the black hole can ensnare any ship sailing on the waves of spacetime, dragging it down into the blindness of hell. It is a vanishing act with no return, a fall with no chance of getting back up, a problem with no answer.
A black hole is not only the most terrifying story that nature could tell, but the most impossible one as well. Scientists before and after the fall of man in centuries past could not understand the riddle. The first and last law of the universe stated that there can be no creation or destruction in the true sense of those words. It is just as absurd for something to be born from nothing as it is for something to be obliterated into nothing. Everything from a shoot of lilac to the dying man sighing his soul is a chapter in a story with no beginning and no ending. The synapses in your brain that fired the bullet of a new and brilliant thought were recycled from an asteroid that slammed into the world or a star that exploded billions of years ago. Everything that you see today was here when the universe was created almost fourteen billion years ago. The colors were always here – the artist has just been mixing and swirling them into new blends.
And so what happens to the man that gets pulled down into the black hole? His body and soul are information at the most basic level, and the black hole dissolves all information. But does the information vanish past the black hole’s gates? Scientists years before had noticed that black holes sing radiation, fading away with every note until they just eventually evaporate. But that evaporation is just the closing of the gates, and a home is more than its door. The information that had been swallowed must still be there – it’s just that the puzzle pieces would be rearranged, the paints mixed into new colors. Nothing is ever lost.
And so, as Nash died – crushed down to the elemental level between the black hole and the engine – something incredible happened. The mouth of the black hole had closed behind him, and the information that was once Nash was now in the stomach of the beast. The stomach itself was not very large, almost the size of a book, but it held every piece of information that the black hole had consumed since its birth. The information was blinding and packed and dense, held together solely by the gravity of the black hole, which was even stronger.
But with the black hole broken, the cage was opened, and the information was free. But since the black hole – like all of its brothers – was a drain beneath the carpet of space and time, the information could not be returned to its universe. The black hole’s stomach existed just an inch outside of our existence.
And so, when the information erupted, it was first like a broken pen, spilling ink on the paper. But it was an inkblot that began to draw pictures and write words. The information was creating a universe of its own, one that was hiding just beneath our own. It was a universe recycled from our own, just as ours had been born from the broken black hole of another existence fourteen billion years ago. The eruption of information into the new universe looked very much the same as our Big Bang, as the ripple of energy overtook the black pond of its space. And as the waves of energy rolled, they became even faster and stronger, until every inch of the new existence was awoken with the splash.
But just as quick as the tidal wave was, time was just as slow. It was billions of years before the energy clumped together into clouds, and billions more before the clouds rained down drops of stars. It was almost ten billion years after the formation of this new universe that its stars began to anchor down planets. Sometime after, those planets recycled their building blocks into creatures that roamed the land and sea and air of their worlds, searching for their meaning. All of this occurred in a universe that lived just an inch beneath our own, unnoticed.
But something happened in this new universe, this interior universe, which nature had not anticipated. Among the ingredients in the primitive soup was the information that was once Nash, information that ran as deep as his soul. And in his soul was his final word, the last note in the song of his life: Ava. The dying man says his final words as a way of being remembered, and Nash had wanted to be remembered by the flag of love that was Chaser. Nash and Chaser had only known each other for a touch, but her good heart was infectious. If Nash’s last word had been his past love, Zara Storia, then he would have thought of sadness and betrayal and the yell of frustration.
But he thought of the good that was Chaser, and that good was what he gave to the new universe. The information that was his memory of Chaser was in that
wave of energy that flooded the new universe. That good would be recycled billions of years later in the life that would take root in that universe. Life there would remember Nash by never hurting other life. Life there would remember Nash by breathing peace. Life there would remember Nash without ever having known him. Where Nash lost himself was where he found love.
Delaware
March 2013-February 2014