Octavia Gone

by Jack McDevitt

  A blue lamp came on. Betsy and Mark both came out of the passenger cabin and stood behind him in the doorway. “Octavia,” he said, “this is the Corbin. Do you read?”

  He got nothing but static.

  “Octavia or shuttle, is anybody there?”

  They waited, wrapped in silence. Finally Betsy laid a hand on Perry’s shoulder: “I guess not,” she said.

  “They might be on the other side of the black hole,” said Perry.

  Mark was staring out at the troubled sky. A substantial portion of it had no stars. It was just dark. And that of course was the black hole. There was a constellation at its edge that looked like someone with a gun. The same constellation was visible on the opposite edge of the disk. He pointed it out to his passengers. “It’s the same group of stars,” he said.

  “In two different places?” asked Mark.

  “Strange things happen when you get a gravity overload.”

  “Captain,” said Betsy, “can we see the station anywhere?”

  “Not yet.”

  Perry flipped a switch. “Thwanna, open a channel to Ventnor.”

  The AI’s green activity lamp lit up. “When you’re ready, Captain.”

  “Corbin to Ventnor. Message for Adam Brentway: We’ve arrived in the KBX44 area. Have begun search. Nothing visible yet. Will get back to you when we have something. Perry.”

  Betsy was obviously intrigued by the object. “Where is the event horizon?” she asked.

  “Out at the edge of the darkness,” said Perry. “Keep in mind we won’t be able to see any part of the black hole directly.”

  “Even if we get closer? Not that I’d want to.”

  “Love,” said Mark, “if you got close enough to see it we might be in trouble.”

  “Actually,” said Thwanna, “an event horizon isn’t a physical condition you can look at. It’s the place where the gravity is so high that nothing can escape from it. Not even light.”

  “Sounds spooky,” Betsy said.

  “How big is it?” asked Mark. “The black hole?”

  Perry passed the question to Thwanna. “It’s about twenty kilometers across.”

  “Is that all?” Mark’s brow turned wrinkly. “I thought these things were seriously big.”

  “They’re seriously massive,” said Perry. “Heavy.”

  “What is the mass? Is it heavier than Kolmar?”

  Again, Perry let Thwanna take it: “Compared to one of these things,” she said, “Kolmar would have the mass of a small pickle.”

  Mark frowned. “She’s not serious?”

  “I suspect she is.”

  “Incredible. I can’t imagine why anybody would want to get anywhere close to something like that. I understand about the wormhole. But who really cares? Why do we need another universe? What’s the point?”

  Thwanna enjoyed talking with passengers. “It’s not so much what you do with a wormhole as what you can learn from it. It provides an insight into the structure of the space-time continuum. It’s what they call blue sky science. It might not have a practical value but it reveals something about the cosmos.”

  Mark laughed. “Well, I don’t think I’d want to go through life without finding out about that.”

  Perry responded with a polite smile. “Says the guy in the starship. If we didn’t do blue sky science, we’d never have gotten off Chippewa. In fact, I guess we’d still be sitting on a beach near the Atlantic Ocean.”

  “There’s certainly truth to that,” said Thwanna. Her tone suggested that the captain was showing an edge in his voice and maybe should stay calm.

  • • •

  They saw nothing. And finally it was time to sleep. He didn’t get much rest that night. Too excited. They all had breakfast together in the morning, and of course the black hole continued to dominate the conversation. It was still too far to see anything other than blurry stars. “Sorry about the long ride,” Perry told them “We didn’t want to take a chance surfacing too close to this thing.”

  “I’m in favor of that,” said Aaron in his squeaky character voice.

  Betsy returned to the passenger cabin and put the HV screen on again with their telescope’s view of the sky. Virgil sat down in the copilot’s chair. He said how happy he was that they’d had this opportunity, that Perry had a great job. “If I had my life to live over,” he said, “I think I’d train for running one of these things.”

  Perry was surprised. He sounded sincere.

  “Captain,” Virgil said, “why’d you become an interstellar pilot?”

  Before Perry could answer, Thwanna was back: “Captain,” she said, “I think I have something.”

  “You found the station?”

  “No. The cannon.” She put it on the display. It was not striking, just a thin rod floating in the night.

  “Excellent. The station should be nearby.”

  “I understand that. But if it’s there, I can’t see it. Not anywhere close. Certainly not sixty kilometers.”

  “Let me try.” Perry bent over the controls and pressed a button. “Rick, you there anywhere? Calling Octavia. Rick Harding.” They waited, listening to the silence. “Rick, this is Adarryl Perry. Hellooo.”

  “Rick’s the onboard pilot, right?” asked Virgil.

  “Yeah. He’s the guy you’d want if you ever got in trouble out here. We’ll have to give it a while, I guess.”

  Where the hell are they? He tried again with the same result. And called Ventnor again. “We’re on-site. We’ve got the cannon, but no sign yet of the station. I’ll get back to you as soon as we locate it.” He signed off. “Thwanna, let me know when they respond.” He got up, stared out at the sky for a few moments, and started for the passenger cabin.

  Virgil smiled and rose easily out of his chair. “Love this low-gravity stuff.” He followed Perry into the passenger cabin, where the captain told everyone about the cannon.

  “But we haven’t found the station yet?” Betsy said.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Well, I guess we just have to be patient.”

  “I’ll let you know when we get something more.” Perry knew that conditions near the black hole were seriously abnormal, but somebody should have been able to get back to him. It was possible that they still didn’t have a good angle to the station. Black holes had a long history of screwing up radio transmissions and sightings. For example, sometimes you got echoes of your own radio transmissions. And the last time he was out here, Perry had seen his own ship on the far side of the black hole.

  Sitting in the pilot training program years before on Dellaconda calculating distances in light-years was considerably different from experiencing them, from actually crossing the sky. The reality was, of course, that he wasn’t really experiencing them. The subspace thrust technology the Corbin used was, as far as he could understand, pure magic. The universe, he’d come to realize, evaded human understanding. And probably always would. Humans might know the rules, have a grip on physical law, and even make the math work, but the senses that had evolved on Earth would never grasp the realities.

  Thwanna continued transmitting the same message every two minutes: “Octavia, do you read? This is the Larry Corbin. Please respond.” She was also scanning the area and increasing her reach as they drew closer to the black hole. “Captain, I see no sign of them.”

  They had to be there.

  • • •

  The station would have appeared as a cluster of lights. But there was nothing other than occasional groups of stars. As Perry watched, an asteroid passed. It wasn’t much more than a blur in the window but it was unnerving. “Close,” he told Thwanna.

  “It’s okay. I was tracking it. No reason to be concerned.”

  “If we have any more like that, give me some advance warning.” The sky was full of rocks orbiting the black hole. Some simply slid down in a gradual path toward the fireworks scattered across the darkness. One riding almost with the Corbin was bucking the tide. It had probabl
y just rolled into the neighborhood and was trying to use its velocity to get clear. But it was losing the battle. “Thwanna,” he said, “we still have nothing?”

  “Negative, Captain. Just the cannon.”

  “How about the shuttle?”

  “Negative. No indication of that either.”

  • • •

  They were sitting buckled in their seats eating turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce and coleslaw. “Are we going to go into orbit at some point?” asked Mark.

  “No,” said Perry, “it’s too unstable out there. Stay belted in unless you have to go somewhere. There shouldn’t be any surprises, but let’s just play it safe for a while.”

  “You don’t think,” said Betsy, “that this thing might have periodic eruptions, do you? Maybe that’s what happened to the station.”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of a black hole erupting or becoming unstable. Thwanna, you know of anything like that ever happening?”

  “No, Captain. We should be okay as long as we keep an eye on the traffic.”

  Mark looked uncomfortable.

  “There’s no need to worry,” Perry said. “Thwanna tracks everything.”

  They all took a moment to concentrate on their lunch. Then Virgil asked whether Perry thought humans would ever be able to do a manned flight through a wormhole.

  “That’s a good question. I’ll have a better idea after we find out what kind of shape the probes were in after they got recovered, provided that actually happened.”

  They finished their meals. Mark suggested they watch a movie. Maybe the Edgar Martin comedy they’d been saving.

  Perry returned to the bridge. “Still nothing?” he asked Thwanna.

  “That is correct,” she said.

  • • •

  At that time, Edgar Martin was just launching a career that would leave its mark across the Confederacy. He played himself, as a writer for a stiff-necked comedian. He and a small group of friends spent most of their time trying to gain the attention of people who could boost their careers or who looked like potential sexual partners. But they consistently compromised themselves with false claims. Luke Hogart, for example, a guy who was always making a mess of one of his assorted public relations jobs, loved to portray himself as a onetime firefighter. When he did, he inevitably, toward the end of the show, found himself facing a desperate situation, someone trapped on a ledge, perhaps, or, as on one classic occasion, a woman who had fallen into a cage at the zoo and was pleading for help as a gorilla closed in. Hogart, of course, stands and watches, later claiming that he tried to get into the cage but it was locked. Fortunately, the woman is not injured. But she does get annoyed.

  Perry always enjoyed Martin, so he joined his passengers. It had been running about three minutes, just time enough for Edgar to begin telling a lovely young woman at a party that he’d had an unusual career as an artist when the lights blinked and the AI’s voice came through the speaker: “Captain, we have something you might want to see.”

  Perry nodded. “Be right there.” He got up and went back onto the bridge.

  Somebody shut Edgar Martin down.

  • • •

  They were approaching the cannon. It was on the display screen again, but clearer this time. “I thought you might want to get a good look at it,” Thwanna said.

  Perry sat down and activated the radio. Last chance, he thought, if they’re not here they’re not anywhere. “Rick, this is Adarryl Perry aboard the Corbin. Please answer up. Are you there anywhere?” He switched over and got static. Then: “Octavia, can you hear me?”

  Behind him the door opened and closed. He cut down the volume of the static and looked back at Mark. “We have a problem?” Mark asked.

  “No. I think Thwanna just wanted to give us a look at the cannon.”

  “Oh,” Mark said. “Holy cats. Yeah. That thing’s enormous.”

  “It is pretty big.”

  “There’s still no sign of them?”

  “No. But we’re in a loud area. Maybe they’re just not getting the signal. Or we’re not getting theirs.”

  “You don’t give up easy, do you?”

  He pointed at the copilot’s seat. “Mark, relax. We’re going to move in closer, and we’ll be braking.”

  “Okay.”

  Perry passed the message to the passenger cabin. Moments later the Corbin turned slightly to starboard and began to decelerate. The cannon grew larger. There was no sign of damage anywhere. He took over the controls and started to brake.

  “It’s tumbling,” said Mark. “Look at it.”

  It was, but slowly. “There’s too much activity here,” said Thwanna. “They would have had to make constant adjustments to keep it aimed at the target. Whatever that was.”

  It descended below the frame and then rose again as Perry drew closer. He continued until it filled the windows, only a couple of kilometers away, an endless tube encased in a cube-shaped frame. He lined up alongside it, matched its velocity, and went into cruise. He couldn’t quite stay with it, though, because it would have required matching its tumble, which would have made everyone ill. “I estimate,” said Thwanna, “that no adjustments have been made in its course in at least a week. Probably longer.”

  “Are you saying,” asked Mark, “that they’ve been sucked into the black hole?”

  “I’m just saying they should be somewhere in this area.”

  “What do you think, Captain?”

  Perry sighed. “I think they’re gone.”

  I.

  1435: 11 YEARS LATER.

  However magnificent the seas and forests of other worlds,

  However dazzling their sunlit skies,

  However wide their beaches,

  There is no view from any place in God’s vast cosmos

  That matches the moonlight falling on one’s own front porch.

  —WALFORD CANDLES, “HOME AT LAST,” 1199

  I can’t remember a happier time than the day Gabe came back. Alex and I had assumed he was dead, along with the other twenty-six hundred passengers and crew on the Capella. It simply disappeared more than a decade ago and nobody had any idea what had happened. Funerals and farewells were conducted, and eventually families and friends went on with their lives. But a few months ago it surfaced. It had gotten tangled with a time warp. On board only about three weeks had passed, so the passengers and crew were shocked to discover that the outside world was eleven years older. Gabe and the others had returned though, and that was all that mattered.

  We picked him up during the rescue operation and returned to Rimway, where we docked at Skydeck. Alex asked Gabe whether he would like to stop and have a drink to celebrate, but he shook his head. “Just take me home,” he said. “I’ll celebrate when we walk in the front door.”

  Gabe was seated beside me in the skimmer a couple of hours later as we descended through the clouds. “I can’t believe this happened,” he said. “Thank God it’s over.” He looked back at Alex. “Are you still living on Rambuckle?”

  “No. After the Capella disappeared, I decided it was time to go home.”

  Gabe let us see he was amused. “So one good thing, at least, has come out of this. You’re living here now, right? In the country house?”

  “Yes, we’ve set up a business here.”

  “It’ll be good to have you home, Alex.”

  “I’ve been here a long time. Thanks for turning the property over to me. Anyhow, we’ll clear everything out. Soon as I can decide where I’m headed. It should only take a few days.”

  “No, no, no. You’re not listening to me. You can’t do that. You’ve been living here too, right? Not just running a business?”

  “I have been, yes.”

  Gabe looked my way. “And you, Chase?”

  “I have a cottage near the river,” I said.

  “I don’t see any rings. You guys aren’t a couple, are you?”

  I’m not sure my cheeks didn’t redden a bit. There’d been
a time when Alex and I had made a connection. But it had been brief, and it was long ago.

  “No,” I said. “I just work for Alex. For Rainbow.” I’d been Gabe’s pilot before the Capella took him away. It was a flight he’d invited me onto, a combination of business and vacation, but fortunately I’d declined. Although it occurred to me that if I’d gone along I’d have been more than a decade younger.

  “Well, anyhow,” said Gabe, “there should be plenty of room at the country house. There’s no reason you should leave, Alex. Stay there, please.”

  Alex hesitated. “Sure, Uncle Gabe. If it’s really okay with you.”

  “Of course it is.” He was suddenly looking out the window at the river. “I’ve never seen the Melony look so good.”

  “That’s because you’re home,” I said.

  “Is Jacob still there?”

  The AI. “Yes,” said Alex. “Of course.”

  “So what kind of business does Rainbow do?”

  “Nothing’s changed. I still deal in antiquities.” Alex showed a touch of discomfort. “I hope that’s not a problem.”

  “It’s okay. Do what you have to. Don’t worry about it.” Gabe had never approved of selling artifacts to private collectors. They should be available to everyone. Not stored away in the homes of the wealthy. But fortunately, on this occasion, he showed a flexibility that allowed him to confront his new situation with a let’s-not-get-excited attitude.

  Minutes later we arrived over the country house. “It doesn’t look any different,” Gabe said. We touched down and climbed out. Then he stood admiring the building, the walkway, and the surrounding trees. “It’s hard to believe what’s happened.”

  We did a round of hugs and kisses, then climbed onto the porch, and the door opened. “Hello, Gabe. I can’t believe you’re back.” It was Jacob, the house AI, who was so excited he could barely contain himself. “It’s so good to see you again. Are you okay? You look great.”