by Larry Niven
“The real Corbell must have been insane or stupid. At seventy degrees and below, the phospholipids in the glia in the brain freeze. The synapses are destroyed. Any educated man knows this,” said Peerssa. “He and the other corpsicles never had a chance. You are an improvement on that Corbell. I will make the clone an improvement over you.”
“I thought you might. No, thanks. There isn’t going to be a CORBELL Mark III.”
Six months later he was not ready for the cold-sleep tank. “You’ve been shirking your exercises,” Peerssa said.
Corbell had just finished an exercise period. Tendonitis had led him to favor his arms these past two months, but they hurt anyway, two hot wires in his shoulders. “It’s your schedule,” he grumbled.
“I would have to thaw you early. Coming out of cold sleep is a trauma. You want to reach the galactic core in optimum condition. Take another two months awake.”
“Fine. I hate that damn tank anyway.” Corbell slumped in a web chair. In near free-fall he was too prone to lose muscle tone. His potbelly protruded.
He had nobody else to talk to, and Peerssa had endless patience. It should have been good timing when Peerssa said, “Have you given any thought to regaining your youth?”
Corbell shuddered. “Forget it.” Hastily, “I don’t mean that literally. If you wipe it from your memory banks you’ll only think of it again later.”
“I take it you’ve canceled your command. What is your objection?”
“It’s ugly.”
“As things stand now, you will die of aging on the return voyage. The cold-sleep treatment is not enough.”
“I will not be ground up for hamburger. Not again.”
“You know the details of Don Juan’s excrement recycling system. Do you find that ugly?”
“Since you ask, yes.”
“But you eat the food and drink the water.”
Corbell didn’t answer.
“You would be a young man when it was over.”
“No. No, I would not.” Corbell was shouting. “I would be hamburger! Contaminated hamburger, garbage to be recycled for the b-b-benefit of your damn clone! He wouldn’t even be a good copy, because you’d be shoving some of your own thoughts in through the computer link!”
“You have no loyalty to anything but yourself.”
Corbell thought, I can shut him up. Anytime. He said, “Whatever it is I am, I’ll settle for it.”
“The only man who ever saw the galactic core. A wonderful thing.” Peerssa had had time and practice to develop that sarcastic tone. “What will you do afterward, once your sole ambition in life is satisfied? Will you order me to self-destruct? A grand funeral pyre for your ending, a fusion flame that alien eyes might see?”
Then Corbell did Peerssa an injustice. “Is that what’s been bothering you? Tell you what,” he said. “After we have our look around the core suns, why don’t we drop some package probes on appropriate planets? You can reach Earth alive. By the time the State sends ships, the algae will have turned some reducing atmospheres to oxygen atmospheres. You can take my mummy home, too, in the cold-sleep tank. Maybe they’ll want it for a museum.”
“You will not be young again?”
“We’ve been through that.”
“Very well. Will you go to the Womb Room, please? I have a great deal to show you.”
Mystified and suspicious, Corbell went.
Peerssa had set up displays on the Womb Room walls. There was a greatly enlarged, slightly blurred view of the galactic core as Corbell had seen it six months ago: drastically flattened, the glow of the suns blurred by interstellar matter. There was a contrasting enlargement of the center of the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. There was a diagram: an oddly contoured disk cut down the center. Corbell frowned, wondering where he had seen that before.
Peerssa spoke as he settled himself in the control chair. “I have never known why you chose the galactic axis as your destination. I may never understand that.”
The core of Andromeda Galaxy glowed with colored lights. Corbell pointed. “For that. For beauty. For the same reason I once went through the Grand Canyon on muleback. Can you imagine a planet on the edge of that sphere? The nights?”
“I can do better. I can put it before you, by extrapolation.” And Peerssa did. Corbell’s chair floated above a dark landscape. The sky was jammed with stars competing for space, big and little, red and blue and pure white, and a spinning pair that threw out a spiral of red gas. The sky turned. A wall of blackness rose in the east, ten thousand cubic light-years of dust cloud…and then the Womb Room was as it had been, while Corbell was still gaping.
“I could have done that before your first term in the cold-sleep tank. We could have completed your mission, seeded the worlds assigned to you, and I could have displayed that sky for you at any time. Why didn’t you say something?”
“It’s not real. Peerssa, didn’t any of your aristocrats ever go cruising through, say, Saturn’s rings, just for the joy of it?”
“For the mining possibilities—”
“Mining. If they said that, they lied.”
“Are you sorry you came?”
Why had he kept on? Knowing that the trip would take more than twenty-one years, that it would take his life, had not changed his mind. Corbell the reconstituted corpsicle would never carve out a normal life for himself. Very well, he would do something memorable.
“No. Why should I be sorry? I expected strangeness in the galactic core. I was right, wasn’t I? It’s nothing like other galaxies, and I’m the first to know it.”
“You’re insane. Imagine my amazement. Never mind. Your choice has had unforeseen consequences. State astronomers expected a close-packed sphere of millions of suns averaging a quarter to half a light-year apart, with red giant suns predominating. Instead, we find this: the matter in the core forced into a disk that flattens drastically toward the center, with a tremendously powerful source of infrared and radio energy at the axis.”
“Like your diagram?”
“Yes, very like this diagram which I find in my data banks, a representation of the structure of the accretion disk around the black hole in Cygnus X-1.”
“Oh!” He had not seen that diagram during his rammer training. His rammer training had not even told him how to avoid stellar-sized black holes, because there were none to be expected on his planned course. He had seen something very like that diagram in an article in Scientific American!
“Yes, Corbel. Your wonderland of lights is being absorbed by a black hole of galactic mass. Its spin must be enormous, from the way it has flattened the mass of stars around it. Eventually the entire galaxy may disappear into—Corbell? Are you ill?”
“No,” Corbell said, his hands covering his face, muffling his voice.
“Don’t be depressed. This is our chance for life.”
“What?”
“A thin chance to see Earth again before you die. A unique experience, win or lose. Isn’t that what you want? Let me explain…”
IV
At the thirteenth awakening he tried to sit up too fast. He woke again, dizzy, flat on his back in the coffin, with Peerssa calling in his ear. “Corbell! Corbell?”
“Here. Where would I go?”
“Be more careful. Lie there for a minute.”
Lean as death he was, and old. Arthritis grated in his knobby joints. With the familiar hunger came nausea. He ran a hand over his scalp—he had been half bald when he entered Forest Lawn—and more of his hair came away.
“Where are we?”
“One month from the black hole and closing. The view will please you.”
He emerged from the cold-sleep tank like a sick Dracula. He made his limping way to the Kitchen, then to the Health Club. His muscles were slack and tended to cramp. The exercises were hard on him. But the pain and the nausea and the creeping years meant little. He felt good. At worst he had found a brand-new way to die.
He asked of the ubiquitous microphones, “Suppose
we go too far in? We won’t ever die, will we? We’d be stopped above the Schwarzschild radius.”
“Only to an outside observer. Not to ourselves. Are you about to change my orders?”
“No.”
Some minutes later he eased himself into the Womb Room chair. He sipped the last of the broth. “Full view.”
Don Juan raced above a sea of churning stars. In a normal galaxy they would have been crowded enough. Here, forced into a plane by the spin of the giant black hole at the center, they were crowded to death. Dying stars burned with a terrible light. They stood like torches in a field of candles. It must be common enough for star to ram star here, or for tides to rip stars apart.
Commoner toward the center, Corbell thought. The center of the sea burned very bright ahead of him. He could see no dark dot at the axis. He hadn’t expected to.
“How far away are we in normal space?”
“Rest space? Three point six light-years.”
“No problems?”
“I believe I can hold us above the plane of the disk until we have passed that very active swelling ahead of us, between two and three light-years from the singularity.”
Corbell looked down at his drive flame, a dim wisp of white between his feet. There was very little matter above the disk, he guessed. “Suppose you can’t? Suppose we have to go through it?”
“You’ll never feel a thing. That region is where the stars lose their identity. They become streamers of dense plasma with nodules of neutronium in them. Most of the light comes from there. Beyond, there is very great flattening and some radiation due to friction in the matter spiraling inward.”
“What about the black hole itself?”
“I still don’t have a view of it. I estimate a circumference of two billion kilometers and a mass of one hundred million solar masses. The ergosphere will be large. We should have no trouble choosing a path through it.”
“You said circumference?”
“Should I have given you the radius? The radius of a black hole may be infinite.”
There was simply no grasping the size of that disk of crushed stars. It was like flying above another universe. At two billion kilometers, the black hole would almost have contained the orbit of Jupiter; but if Corbell could have seen past that swelling ahead, that Ring of Fire, he would have found the black hole invisibly small.
Light caught the corner of his eye, and he turned to see a supernova glaring white-on-red. He’d just missed seeing a sun torn apart by tides, its ten-million degree heart spilled across the sky.
He asked what he had never asked before. “Peerssa, what are you thinking?”
“I don’t quite know how to answer that.”
“Try.”
“I’m not thinking anything. My decisions are made. They are mathematically rigorous. I face no choices.”
“How are you going to find Earth?”
“I know where Sol will be in three million years.”
“Three—! Won’t it be more like seventy thousand?”
“We’re diving deep into a tremendous gravity field. Time will be compressed for us. The black hole is large enough that tides will not tear us apart, but we’ll lose almost three million years before I fire the fusion motor. What more can I do? The odds are finite that we will find Sol. Or the State may have spread through a million cubic light-years of space before we arrive.”
“The odds are finite. Peerssa, you’re strange.” But Corbell felt no urge to laugh. Seventy thousand years B.C., there had been Neanderthal Man and a few Cro-Magnon. Humans. Three million years ago, nothing but a club-swinging, meat-eating ape. What would inhabit the Earth three million years from now?
Corbell spent most of his time in the Womb Room, watching the accretion disk swirl past. He liked the uncorrected view, the display that showed the universe distorted by Don Juan’s velocity.
Since turnover, the ship had shed most of its enormous relativistic mass. Don Juan had been moving faster after Corbell’s first term in the cold-sleep tank. But it was still traveling near lightspeed, and accelerating steadily under the pull of a point-source one hundred million times the mass of the Sun. The accretion disk showed rainbow-colored ahead of him, with the Ring of Fire a violet-white hill coming near. The stars were jammed together; you couldn’t tell one from the next unless the next had exploded. They graded back through the rainbow until the sea of flame behind Don Juan was deep red and frozen in place, with the occasional supernova showing yellow-white or greenish-white.
The Ring of Fire—the swollen region where the heat trapped within the streaming star-stuff grew even more powerful than the black hole’s compression effect—came near. It was blinding-bright before Corbell gave up. “Reduce that light,” he said, half covering his eyes.
“I’ve cut it to ten percent. Let me know when I must cut it again.”
“Are you all right? Will it burn out your cameras?”
“I think not. Remember, you were to dive almost into Sol to decelerate at the end of your mission. We can handle high intensities of light.”
The Ring of Fire was a flattened doughnut twenty light-years in circumference, a quarter of a light-year thick: four or five cubic light-years of green-to-blue-white star, with every possible grade of fusion and fission going on in it. As if Hell were a tremendous mountain…coming near…and Don Juan crossed it on a fan of fusion flame, thrusting hard. Corbell felt the thrust drop away. He sat forward as the ship dropped along the inner gradient and left the Ring of Fire behind, a dull red wall. The inner accretion disk was drastically thinner, savagely compressed. Corbell peered toward where the black hole ought to be. All he saw was more star-matter, hurtingly violet-white at the center.
It was all happening terribly fast now. Minutes left, or seconds. Peerssa was firing the attitude jets at strange angles. There were no stars to see in this inner disk: no detail at all. It was as uniform as peanut butter.
“It’s all neutronium,” said Peerssa. “It even has some of neutronium’s crystalline structure, but that structure is constantly breaking up. I can see the X-ray flashes, like ripples.”
“I wish I had some of your senses.”
“The computer link—”
“No.”
Behind them the Ring of Fire reddened further and was gone. The inner disk grew brighter and bluer and was suddenly past. In the last instant Corbell saw the black hole.
The onboard fusion drive roared beneath him, slammed him down into his chair. Light exploded in his face. It resolved: a blaze of violet light ahead of him, a broad ring of embers around it. Elsewhere, black.
Peerssa said, “There is something we must discuss.”
“Wait a minute. Give me a chance to resume breathing.”
Peerssa waited.
Corbell said, “It’s over? We lived through that?”
“Yes.”
“Well done.”
“Thank you.”
“What’s happening now?”
“Firing a reaction drive within the ergosphere of a black hole has driven us dangerously near lightspeed. I am using the ram fields to ward interstellar matter from us. I won’t be able to use them as a drive until we can shed some velocity. We will reach the vicinity of Sol in thirteen point eight years, ship’s time, unless we overshoot.”
“Did we really lose three million years?”
“Yes. Corbell, I must have your opinion. Will the State have collapsed over three million years?”
Corbell laughed a little shakily. “We’ll be lucky if there’s anything like human beings left. I can’t guess what they’ll be like. Three million years! I wish there’d been another way to do it.” He stood up. He was suddenly ravenous.
Peerssa answered: “I was ordered to preserve your life and the integrity of the ship, but never your convenience. My loyalty is to the State.”
Corbell stopped. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“There was another way to use the black hole, once we knew it existed. At midp
oint we could have continued to accelerate. We would have spent perhaps eighty years reaching the galactic hub. If we passed near enough to the black hole, its spin would have bent our hyperbolic path back upon itself, though we would still have been well outside the ergosphere. Another eighty years of ship’s time would have returned us to Sol, seventy thousand years after your departure.”
“You thought of that? And you didn’t do it?”
“Corbel, I have no data on the nature of water-monopoly empires. I had to take your word entirely.”
“What are you talking about?”
His answer came in Corbell’s recorded voice. “I think the State could last seventy or a hundred thousand. See, these water-monopoly empires, they don’t collapse. They can rot from within, to the point where a single push from the barbarians outside can topple them. The levels of society lose touch with each other, and when it comes to the crunch, they can’t fight. But it takes that push from outside. There’s no revolution in a water empire.”
Corbell said, “I don’t—”
“A water empire can grow so feeble that a single barbarian horde can topple it. But, Peerssa, the State doesn’t have any outside.”
“—I don’t understand.”
“The State could last seventy or a hundred thousand years, because all of humanity was part of the State. There were no barbarians waiting hungrily for the State to show weakness. The State could have grown feeble beyond any precedent, feeble enough to fall before the hatred of a single barbarian. You, Corbell. You.”
“Me?”
“Did you exaggerate the situation? I thought of that, but I couldn’t risk it. And I couldn’t ask.”
He’s a computer. Perfect memory, rigid logic, no judgment. I forgot. I talked to him like a human being, and now—“You have heroically saved the State from me. I’ll be damned.”
“Was the danger unreal? I couldn’t ask. You might have lied.”
“I never wanted to overthrow the damn government. All I wanted was a normal life. I was only forty-four years old! I didn’t want to die!”
“You never could have had what you called a normal life. It was already impossible in twenty-one ninety Anno Domini.”