Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks)

by Martin H Greenberg

  A charming idea, and promising. For fifty years, now, hyper-c Explorers had been dispatched to a number of scenic vistas and potential galactic tourist attractions that might attract the curious or the awestruck—the Orion Nebula, the fast-ticking pulsar of M-l, the swelling twin gas lobes of Eta Carina, the cosmic lighthouses of IRC +10011, Nova Cygni, and Monoceros R2—all these and hundreds more had been investigated.

  And chief among them, of course, had been the enigmas thundering at the Galaxy’s core, the complex of novae, gas clouds, and the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A West . . . with the asterisk pronounced star, and indicating a point radio source.

  One thousand astronomical units from the center, something had materialized out of empty space, traveling across Hawking’s line of flight, a huge something three hundred kilometers long. It was visible for only a fraction of a second—they didn’t get a good, detailed look at the thing until Hawking’s AI played the encounter back for them in slow motion later. The object—a ship? a small, artificial world?—had been all curves and sloping angles, an objet d’art sculpted in mottled patterns of gold and ebony. It passed far in front of them, but its wake, energy fields fluttering like violet curtains far out across the void, had brushed the Hawking lightly, burning out her primary drives, knocking her out of hyper-c, and sending her hurtling toward the Center at just under the speed of light.

  As Cardell said, the Other probably hadn’t even noticed the dust-mote Hawking.

  “At least,” she said quietly, “we know they have some of the same values we do.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “A love of beauty . . . or the same thing that we call beautiful.” She nodded toward the dazzling brilliance of the Center ahead. “And a sense of wonder, of awe, or at least of curiosity.”

  “And maybe they’re just using the warped local space as a kind of transit station. Space- and timelike passages, you know? Beings that advanced . . . how can we know what they find beautiful, or awe-inspiring?”

  “That ship,” Kevyn said, “was beautiful.”

  “It killed us. I can’t get myself misty-eyed over that.”

  His mood continued to grate at her. Shutting his fluctuating emotions out, Kevyn floated close to a bulkhead rendered transparent by the Hawkins AI, staring out into wonder. It was glorious . . . and terrifying. The probe, traveling at very nearly the speed of light, was passing the innermost shreds of star-stuff now, hurtling across the great, empty void between the outer accretion disk and the monster glowing at the center. The view had been corrected for optical aberration caused by the s tremendous velocity; so vast was the panorama revealed, however, that there was little sensation of speed. The black hole itself lay just ahead, slowly growing in size.

  An inner accretion disk nearly three hundred astronomical units across glowed blue-hot, from this vantage point a sharply tilted oval radiating in fiercely scintillating, high-energy wavelengths. The black hole itself . . .

  It’s not even black, she thought, a little wildly. They’d been briefed on the physics of the thing and even viewed images transmitted by unmanned probes, though none from so privileged a vantage point as this. As the whirling plasma funneled down into the hole’s gravitational maw, accelerating at the last to eight tenths the speed of light, it red-shifted sharply out of view. Some of that infalling, superheated matter vanished into the hole’s event horizon, that shell at the Schwarzchild radius surrounding the dimensionless point which was the hole proper where the hole’s escape velocity equaled the speed of light itself, a pseudo-surface that should have been a lightless black.

  Instead, it glowed, a pinpoint at this distance, as bright as a sun. Brighter, Kevyn reminded herself; as some material plunged into the event horizon, some was slingshotted out and away, flaring star-core hot, radiating violently at UV and x-ray wavelengths, emitting ten thousand times the light of Earth’s sun, at temperatures literally incalculable. And the object’s ferocious gravity bent light sharply, twisting its surroundings into dazzling, shifting rainbow arcs that clearly outlined the hole’s otherwise invisible horizons.

  The ultimate night, death black, but shrouded in shifting, dazzlingly brilliant displays of gossamer light.

  It was, she thought, so incredibly beautiful . . . and so deadly. Hawking fell through an environment utterly inimical to life. Already, the temperatures outside the probe vessel’s fragile shell registered twelve thousand degrees—hotter than the surface of distant Sol. Only the ship’s antimatter-driven radiation shields held x-ray and gamma, superheated gas and searing charged particles at bay. If those fields should fail . . . no, when they failed, Hawking and her two unwilling tourists would vanish in a puff of vapor too quickly for the fact to register on human nervous systems.

  At least they would die quickly.

  “It looks like we’re going faster,” Cardell said.

  “Objectively or subjectively?” she asked. It was a stab at humor, a means of lightening the heavy atmosphere.

  He scowled at her. “You know what I mean.”

  “Of course. Stephen? How long do we have?”

  Stephen was the Hawking’s AI, the mind guiding the probe until the encounter with the giant alien ship had knocked out their drive. “We are currently one hundred twenty-three light-hours from the immediate vicinity of the black hole,” the AI replied, his voice calm and unhurried. “Slightly more than five light-days. At this velocity, however, time dilation is reducing our tau with respect to the outside universe. Within our frame of reference, we have another one hundred five minutes, twenty seconds from . . . now.?”

  A little less than two hours more.

  At least, she thought with just a touch of bitterness, she only had that much longer to endure Cardell’s out of control emoting.

  “I wonder where they’re from, the Aliens?” she said after a long silence. “I like your idea of them using the Galactic Hub as a kind of transit station. Space must be so twisted in close to the Center. . . .”

  “Space and time,” Cardell reminded her. “Space-time. When physics gets this weird, this intense, the two can’t be told apart any more.”

  The inner accretion disk was visibly growing larger. Were they actually accelerating? Or was she witnessing the combined effects of their relativistic velocity and the gravitational distortion of local space?

  “The briefing download was talking about timelike paths,” she said.

  “Pick the right one,” Cardell told her, “and we could end up anywhere. Any when.” He looked about the compartment, his face showing his anguish. “And anything else would be better than here.”

  “It feels like time is passing faster out there than seventy to one. I wonder . . .”

  “Stephen!” Cardell called out. “Is that true? Are we accelerating?”

  “We are accelerating,” the voice of the Hawking replied.

  “The black hole’s gravity—” he began.

  “While we are within the black hole’s gravitational well,” Stephen went on, unperturbed, “it is not contributing to our vector directly. We may indeed be within a closed, timelike conduit.”

  “How . . . how long do we have?”

  “I cannot say. Local space is not curved according to any natural set of space-time vectors I can perceive or calculate.”

  “What does that mean?” Cardell demanded. “That that thing out there is artificial?”

  “If by ‘that’ you mean the central black hole, no. Most likely, our understanding of physical conditions at this proximity to a singularity of two point five million solar masses is faulty or incomplete. It is possible, however, especially given our recent encounter with an alien vessel of some sort, that the core region has been engineered in some way through the application of extraordinarily advanced technologies.”

  “The ship that hit us,” Kevyn began.

  “It is unlikely that the other vessel possessed the requisite technology,” Stephen told her. “At a guess, that vessel represented a techno
logy some thousands of years in advance of our own. To manipulate the spacio-gravitational fields in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, however, would require millions of years of technic evolution, at the very least.”

  “Maybe there’s a chance for us, then,” Cardell said. Kevyn felt his excitement, and his desperation. “Can we communicate with the beings who created it? Maybe get them to rescue us?”

  Stephen was silent for several seconds, an ominous pause for an intelligence that thought far more quickly than organic humans. “If an insect ran across your bare foot,” the AI said at last, “causing the skin to twitch . . . could that insect claim to have established communication with you?”

  “I’d know it was there,” Cardell said.

  “I think that’s part of the problem, Jon,” Kevyn said. “Would you help the insect? Even know what it wanted from you? Or would you smash it?”

  He gave her a sour look. “Please. I’m a Rational Ethidst.” She shrugged. “Okay, so you don’t kill needlessly. And maybe they’re ethical atheists as well. But communicating with them might be impossible if they’re that far advanced.”

  “Nonsense,” he told her. “Why are we here, anyway? Because technically advanced aliens might be lingering in the vicinity of the Galactic Hub, studying conditions, or waiting for other starfarers to show up.” He gestured at the surroundings bulkheads. “We have the finest linguistics program ever written, a complete communications suite capable of establishing contact at any wavelength and by any mode, the latest AI to integrate it all . . . we even have you, a trained telepath. Anyone we’re likely to meet is going to be more advanced than we are, and just as eager to communicate. We won’t have a problem.”

  “Unless they have better things to do than talking with bugs on their feet,” Kevyn replied, “you’re right. Assuming, of course, that we can understand them.”

  “Even if there aren’t any translation problems,” Stephen’s voice added, “there could be fundamental differences in outlook, in the way your human brains work, and theirs.”

  “You two are just full of cheerfulness,” Cardell said. “I think we should try to make contact! See if they can rescue us!”

  Kevyn shrugged. “Of course we should try . . . if we’re given the opportunity. But so far, we don’t know if anybody’s out there to hear us.”

  “One ship was. They got us into this mess!”

  “And it’s gone.”

  “So . . . what? We just float here in this bubble waiting to die?”

  “We do what we can. And we hope.”

  There was little enough that could be done except hope. Hawking was broadcasting an emergency signal on a broad swath of frequencies. If there was anyone out there to hear, they ought to hear . . . assuming they still used something as primitive as radio or laser communications.

  And assuming they were close enough. It was hard to keep in mind the sheer scale of what she was seeing. The black hole was closer now, but still light took three days to cross the distance. Help could be quite close indeed . . . and yet not hear their speed-of-light cries for help until it was too late.

  She closed her eyes and reached out into the void, seeking another mind. Telepathic communications were para-physical, not limited by the speed of light, but they were limited by signal strength over distance . . . and by the ability of the receiving mind to interpret the thoughts and symbolic referents of another. If there were other minds listening out there, she might be too far or too distorted by relativity to be picked up. And even if she weren’t, those listening minds might be so alien as to be beyond her ken.

  She reached out as hard and as far as she could, but felt nothing beyond the cold and encircling void . . . that and the anger and gibbering terror lurking just beneath the surface of Jon Cardell’s conscious thoughts.

  Time passed—far more swiftly for those aboard the crippled Hawking than for the universe beyond. They crossed the void between inner and outer accretion rings, looking down onto the tenuous, infalling spirals of clotted dust, gas, and meteoric debris that fed the one from the other. Falling past the edge of the inner disk, they could scarcely tear their eyes away from the light-sea spectacle. The inner accretion disk, white hot, blue-hot toward the center, displayed perfectly circular grooves like an old-fashioned compact disc . . . or the rings of distant Saturn. Matter within the inner portion of the disk was orbiting at a fair percentage of the speed of light. Friction, heat, magnetic field, radiation pressure, and the black hole’s astonishing gravity all combined to gradually drag the matter closer, until it vanished beyond the redshift limit and plunged forever past the event horizon and into oblivion. Their inbound course, it was clear, was going to skim the event horizon proper. They might even whip past the black hole and into space once more.

  If so, it would not affect the outcome. They were forever trapped by the black hole’s gravity. Of more immediate concern, the tidal forces set up by the Maelstrom’s gravitational field would soon begin attracting one end of their bodies more strongly than another. At some point in the proceedings, they and the Hawking both would be stretched into spaghetti-thin threads kilometers long, before they were at last consumed. At the moment, they were still in free fall, but as they whipped closer past the black hole . . .

  “I am detecting an anomaly,” Stephen’s voice said. “One moment. . . .”

  Kevyn started. She’d been . . . lost for a time, her thoughts wandering, captured by the Maelstrom ahead. Could she actually have been daydreaming through her last hour of life?

  “We are being drawn slightly off course,” Stephen continued after a moment. “Angle of deflection is two point seven degrees away from the Center.”

  Cardell had strapped himself into one of the two couches at the control dais. He unbuckled now and kicked off in a glide across the compartment, catching himself at the bulkhead next to Kevyn. The mental shock of his close proximity was like being doused with icy water. “What is it?” he demanded. “Is it . . . artificial?”

  “Unlikely,” Stephen replied. “We seem to be entering a region where space has been highly stressed.” Another pause. “The angle of deflection has increased to two point nine degrees. This may be a local spatio-temporal distortion, a place where space has been folded slightly, in an essentially chaotic and unpredictable manner.”

  “A wormhole?” Kevyn asked.

  “No. Not in the sense that it provides a shortcut to another universe, or to a distant part of our own. But it may be the opening to a space- or timelike path.”

  The view outside . . . changed.

  Kevyn found it difficult at first to know just what had changed, or how . . . but the stars seemed to be drifting in a way that could not be explained by the movement of the Hawking in relation to the Maelstrom. They seemed blurred and faded as well, as though she were looking through a thickening mist. The stars were moving faster now, rotating about the Center. . . .

  The bulkheads flashed a brilliant white, then dulled to opaque solidity once again. Kevyn reached out with one hand, touching the hard blue surface. “Stephen? What happened to the image?”

  The ship’s AI was a long time in answering.

  “I find myself unable to calculate star positions quickly enough to display an accurate projection. I also . . . find it difficult to accept as accurate what I seem to be seeing. I do not wish to display faulty data.”

  “Why don’t you let us decide what we want to see?” Cardell said. “Display on!”

  The bulkheads lit up again, flickered sullenly, faded, then finally showed the stars once more.

  Or what should have been the stars. The entire thronging cluster of the Galactic Hub was streaking around them now, circling the central Maelstrom too quickly to follow. Gas clouds took on a new solidity, billowing, streaming, also circling.

  The black hole itself, and its accretion disk, were dazzlingly bright blurs of light.

  “Evidently,” Stephen informed them, “we have indeed fallen into a timelike conduit. We
appear to be moving into the future at a rate which I cannot at present compute.

  “But are we still going to hit the event horizon?” Cardell demanded. “Are we still going to die?”

  “I don’t know. Our current path seems to be skimming past the black hole some millions of kilometers beyond the event horizon. However, the black hole is gaining mass at a rapid rate, and I cannot see the future.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re all going to see the future,” Kevyn sad, “as soon as we emerge from this—”

  They emerged.

  The stars stopped their time-blurred rotation about the Maelstrom so abruptly that Kevyn felt momentarily disoriented, struck by vertigo. She reached out to the bulkhead to steady herself. The stars were . . . strange.

  It took her a moment to realize what the change was, but that was only because her mind wasn’t working at peak efficiency. The stars were as thick, as gloriously close packed as before, but where before they’d been strewn in random, clotted handfuls, they now possessed an orderliness that reminded Kevyn of military ranks, no, of a molecular model of some highly complex crystalline mineral.

  Recognition of the pattern wasn’t immediate. The stars were so numerous and so close together that it was hard to see, but she now had the impression that she was looking out, not at stars, but at row upon row of tiny bright windows . . . or perhaps the lights of a large city laid out along straight-line streets. There were nodes or clusters where the stars were bunched more tightly, and as she watched, she began to get the impression that those ranks of stars were arrayed in concentric shells, one inside the next, like the layered skins of an onion.

  Order had been imposed on the random scatterings of the Galaxy’s stars. She tried to imagine a technology capable of changing the orbits of billions of stars, and failed.