McAuley has a foot in several different camps of science fiction writing, being considered one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are producing that brand of rigorous hard science fiction with updated modern and stylistic sensibilities that is sometimes referred to as “radical hard science fiction”, in addition to being one of the major young writers who are producing that revamped and retooled widescreen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the New Baroque Space Opera. But, something of a literary millipede, McAuley refuses to be limited to a mere two camps in which to put his feet, and also writes Dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future, some elegant and literate Alternate History, and even some unabashed fantasy and supernatural horror stories, all with equal fluency and skill. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel; two collections of his short work, The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country; and an original anthology coedited with Kim Newman, In Dreams. His acclaimed novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His most recent books are Child of the River and Ancients of Days, the first two volumes of a major new trilogy of ambitious scope and scale, Confluence, set ten million years in the future. The third book in the trilogy, Shrine of Stars, is due out soon. Currently he is working on a new novel, The Secret of Life. His web site address is at http://www.omegacom.demon.co.uk.
On the busy, bustling, colonized future Moon, McAuley reminds us that although everyone makes mistakes, some mistakes have far greater consequences than others . . .
YOU PROBABLY THINK that you know everything about it. After all, here we are, barely into the second quarter of the first century of the Third Millennium, and it’s being touted as the biggest event in the history of humanity. Yeah, right. But tossing aside such impossibly grandiose claims, it was and still is a hell of a story. It’s generated millions of bytes of Web journalism (two years after, there are still more than two hundred official Web sites, not to mention the tens of thousands of unofficial newsgroups devoted to proving that it was really caused by God, or aliens, or St Elvis), tens of thousands of hours of TV and a hundred schlocky movies (and I do include James Cameron’s seven-hour blockbuster), thousands of scientific papers and dozens of thick technical reports, including the ten-million-page congressional report, and the ghostwritten biographies of scientists Who Should Have Known Better.
Now you might think that I’m sending out my version because I was either misrepresented or completely ignored in all the above. Not at all. I’ll be the first to admit that my part in the whole thing was pretty insignificant, but nevertheless I was there, right at the beginning. So consider this shareware text a footnote or even a tall tale, and if you like it, do feel free to pass it on, but don’t change the text or drop the byline, if you please.
It began in the middle of a routine calibration run in the Exawatt Fusion facility. All the alarms went off and the AI in charge shut everything down, but there was no obvious problem. The robots could find no evidence of physical damage, yet the integrity and radiation alarms kept ringing, and analysis of experimental data showed that there had been a tremendous fluctuation in energy levels just after the fusion pulse. So the scientists sent the two of us, Mike Doherty and me, over the horizon to eyeball the place.
You’ve probably seen a zillion pictures. It was a low, square concrete block half-buried in the smooth floor of Mendeleev Crater on the Moon’s far side, surrounded by bulldozed roadways and cable trenches, the two nuclear reactors which powered it just at the level horizon to the south. At peak, the Exawatt used a thousand million times more power than the entire U.S. electrical grid to fire up, for less than a millisecond, six pulsed lasers focused on a target barely ten micrometres across, producing conditions which simulated those in the first picoseconds of the Big Bang, before symmetry was broken. Like the atom bomb a century before, it pushed the envelopes of engineering and physics. The scientists responsible for firing off that first thermonuclear device believed that there was a slight but definite chance that it would set fire to the Earth’s atmosphere; the scientists running the Exawatt thought that there was a possibility that it might burst its containment and vaporize several hundred square kilometres around it. That was why they had built it on the Moon’s far side, inside a deep crater. That’s why it was run by robots, with the actual labs in a bunker buried over the horizon.
That’s why, when it went wrong, they sent in a couple of GLPs to take a look.
We went in an open rover, straight down the service road. We were wearing bright orange radiation-proof shrouds over our Moon suits, and camera rigs on our shoulders so that the scientists could see what we saw. The plant looked intact, burning salt-white in the glare of a lunar afternoon, throwing a long black shadow towards us. The red-and-green perimeter lights were on; the cooling sink, a borehole three kilometres deep, wasn’t venting. I drove the rover all the way around it, and then we went in.
The plant was essentially one big hall filled with the laser-pumping assemblies, huge frames of parallel colour-coded pipes each as big as one of those old Saturn rockets and threaded through with bundles of heavy cables and trackways for the robots which serviced them. We crept along the tiled floor in their shadows like a pair of orange mice, directing our camera rigs here and there at the request of the scientists. The emergency lights were still strobing, and I asked someone to switch them off, which they did after only five minutes’ discussion about whether it was a good idea to disturb anything.
The six laser-focusing pipes, two metres in diameter, converged on the bus-sized experimental chamber. Containment was a big problem; that chamber was crammed with powerful magnetic tori which generated the fields in which the target, a pellet of ultra-compressed metallic hydrogen, was heated by chirped pulse amplification to ten billion degrees Centigrade. It was surrounded by catwalks and hidden by the flared ends of the focusing pipes, the capillary grid of the liquid sodium cooling system, and a hundred different kinds of monitor. We checked the system diagnostics of the monitors, which told us only that several detectors on the underside had ceased to function, and then, harangued by scientists, crawled all around the chamber as best we could, sweating heavily in our suits and chafing our elbows and knees.
Mike found a clue to what had happened when he managed to wriggle into the crawl space beneath the chamber, quite a feat in a pressurized suit. He had taken off his camera rig to do it, and it took quite a bit of prompting before he started to describe what he saw.
“There’s a severed cable here, and something has punched a hole in the box above it. Let me shift around . . . Okay, I can see a hole in the floor, too. About two centimetres across. I’m poking my screwdriver into it. Well, it must go all the way through the tiles, I can’t see how deep. Hey, Frank, get me some of that wire, will you?”
There was a spool of copper cable nearby. I cut off a length and passed it in.
“You two get on out of there now,” one of the scientists advised.
“This won’t take but a minute,” Mike said, and started humming tunelessly, which meant that he was thinking hard about something.
I asked, because I knew he wouldn’t say anything otherwise, “What is it?”
“Looks like someone took a shot at this old thing,” Mike said. “Shit. How deep does the foundation go?”
“The concrete was poured to three metres,” someone said over the radio link, and the scientist who’d spoken before said, “It really isn’t a good idea to mess around there, fellows.”
“It goes all the way through,” Mike said. “I wiggled the wire around and it came back up with dust on the end.”
“This is Ridpath,” someone else said. Ridpath, you may remember, was the chief of the science team. Although he wasn’t exactly responsible for what happened, he made m
illions from selling the rights to his story, and then hanged himself six months after it was all over. He said, “You boys get on out of there. We’ll take it from here.”
Five rolligons passed us on our way back, big fat pressurized vehicles making speed. “You put a hair up someone’s ass,” I told Mike, who’d been real quiet after he crawled out from beneath the chamber.
“I think something escaped,” he said.
“Maybe some of the laser energy was deflected.”
“There weren’t any traces of melting,” Mike said, with a preoccupied air. “And just a bit of all that energy would make a hell of a mess, not leave a neat little hole. Hmm. Kind of an interesting problem.”
But he didn’t say any more about it until a week later, about an hour before the president went on the air to explain what had happened.
The Moon was a good place to be working then. It was more-or-less run by scientists, the way Antarctica had been before the drillers and miners got to it. There were about two thousand people living there at any one time, either working on projects like the Exawatt or the Big Array or the ongoing resource mapping surveys, or doing their own little thing. Mike and I were both part of the General Labour Pool, ready to help any one. We’d earned our chops doing Ph.D.s, but we didn’t have the drive or desire to work our way up the ladder of promotion. We didn’t want responsibility, didn’t want to be burdened with administration and hustling for funds, which was the lot of career researchers. We liked to get our hands dirty. Mike has a double Ph.D. in pure physics and cybernetics and is a whiz at electronics; I’m a run-of-the-mill geologist who is also a fair pilot. We made a pretty good team back then and generally worked together whenever we could, and we’d worked just about every place on the Moon.
When the president made the announcement, we’d moved on from the Exawatt and were taking a few days’ R&R. I’d found out about a gig supervising the construction of a railway from the South Pole to the permanent base at Clavius, but Mike wouldn’t sign up and wouldn’t say why, except that it was to do with what had happened at the Exawatt.
We’d been exposed to a small amount of radiation when we’d gone into the plant – Mike a little more than me – and had spent a day being checked out before getting back on the job. The scientists were all over the plant by then. The reaction chamber had been dismantled by robots, and we brought in all kinds of monitoring equipment. Not only radiation counters, but a gravity measuring device and a neutrino detector. We helped bore a shaft five hundred metres deep parallel to the hole punched through the floor, and probes and motion sensors and cameras were lowered into it.
Mike claimed to have worked out what had happened as soon as he stuck the wire in the hole through the foundation, but he wouldn’t tell me. “You should be able to guess from what they were trying to measure,” he said, the one time I asked, and smiled when I called him a son of a bitch. He’s very smart, but sort of fucked up in the head, antisocial, careless of his appearance and untidy as hell, and proud that he has four of the five symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome. But he was my partner, and I trusted him; when he said it wasn’t a good idea to take up a new contract, I nagged him for a straight hour to explain why, and went along with him even though he wouldn’t. He was spending all his spare time making calculations on his slate, and was still working on them at the South Pole facility.
I raised the subject again when news of the special presidential announcement broke. “You’d better tell me what you think happened,” I told Mike, “because I’ll hear the truth in less than an hour, and after that I won’t believe you.”
We were in an arbor in the dome of the South Pole facility. Real plants, cycads and banana plants and ferns, growing in real dirt around us, sunlight pouring in at a low angle through the diamond panes high above. The dome capped a small crater some three hundred metres across, on a high ridge near the edge of the South Pole–Aitken Basin and in permanent sunlight, the sun circling around the horizon once every twenty-eight days. It was hot and humid, and the people splashing in the lake below our arbor were making a lot of noise. The lake and its scattering of atolls took up most of the crater’s floor, with arbors and cafés and cabins on the bench terrace around it. The water was billion-year-old comet water, mined from the regolith in permanently shadowed craters. A rail gun used to lob shaped loads of ice to supply the Clavius base in the early days, but Clavius had grown, and its administration was uncomfortable with the idea of being bombarded with ice meteors, which was why they wanted to build a railway. In the low gravity, the waves out on the lake were five or six metres high, and big droplets flew a long way, changing shape like amoebas, before falling back. People were body surfing the waves; a game of water polo had been going on for several days in one of the bays.
I’d just been playing for a few hours, and I was in a good mood, which was why I didn’t strangle Mike when, after I asked him to tell me what he knew, he flashed his goofy smile at me and went back to scratching figures on his slate. Instead, I snatched the slate from his hands and held it over the edge of the arbor and said, “You tell me right now, or the slate gets it.”
Mike scratched the swirl of black hair on his bare chest and said, “You know you won’t do it.”
I made to skim it through the air and said, “How many times do you think it would bounce before it sank?”
“I thought I’d give you a chance to work it out. And it isn’t as if there’s anything we can do. Didn’t you enjoy the rest?”
“What’s this got to do with not taking up that contract?”
“There’s no point building anything any more. You still haven’t guessed, have you?”
I tossed the slate to him. “Maybe I should pick you up and throw you in the lake.”
I meant it, and I’m a lot bigger than him.
“It’s a black hole,” he said.
“A black hole.”
“Sure. My guess is that the experiment caused a runaway quantum fluctuation that created a black hole. It had to be bigger than the Planck size, and most probably was a bit bigger than a hydrogen atom, because it obviously has been taking up other atoms easily enough. Say around ten to the power twenty-three kilograms. The mass of a big mountain, like Everest. The magnetic containment fields couldn’t hold it, of course, and it dropped straight out of the reaction chamber and went through the plant’s floor.”
I said, “The hole we saw was a lot bigger than the width of a hydrogen atom.”
“Sure. The black hole disrupted stuff by tidal force over a far greater distance than its Swartzschild radius, and sucked some of it right in. That’s why there was no trace of melting, even though it was pretty hot, and spitting out X-rays and probably accelerated protons, too – cosmic rays.”
I didn’t believe him, of course, but it was an interesting intellectual exercise. I said, “So where did the mass come from? Not from the combustion chamber fuel.”
“Of course not. It was a quantum fluctuation, just like the Universe, which also came out of nothing. And the Universe weighs a lot more than ten to the power twenty-three kilograms. Something like, let’s see –”
“Okay,” I said quickly, before Mike lost himself in esoteric calculations. “But where is it now?”
“Well, it went all the way through,” Mike said.
“Through the Moon? Then it came out, let’s see” – I tried to visualize the Moon’s globe – “somewhere in Mare Fecunditas.”
“Not exactly. It accelerated in free fall toward the core, went past, and started to fall back again. It’s sweeping back and forth, gaining mass and losing amplitude with each pass. That’s what the president is going to tell everyone.”
I thought about it. Something just bigger than an atom but massing as much as a mountain, plunging through the twenty-five-kilometre-thick outer layer of gardened regolith, smashing a centimetre-wide tunnel through the basalt crust and the mantle, passing through the tiny iron core, gathering mass and slowing, so that it did not quite emerge a
t the far side before falling back.
“You were lucky it didn’t come right back at you,” I said.
“The amplitude diminishes with each pass. Eventually it’ll settle at the Moon’s gravitational centre. And that’s why I didn’t want to sign the contract. After the president tells everyone what I’ve just told you, all the construction contracts will be put on hold. What you should do is make sure we’re first on the list for evacuation work.”
“Evacuation?”
“There’s no way to capture the black hole. The Moon, Frank, is fucked. But we’ll get plenty of work before it’s over.”
He was half right, because the next day, after the president had admitted that an experiment had somehow dropped a black hole inside the Moon, a serious problem that would require an international team to monitor, we were both issued with summonses to appear at the hastily set-up congressional inquiry.
It was a bunch of bullshit, of course. We went down to Washington, D.C., and spent a week locked up in the Watergate hotel watching bad cable movies and endless talk shows, with NASA lawyers showing up every now and then to rehearse our Q&As, and in the end we had no more than half an hour of easy questions before the committee let us go. Our lawyers shook our hands on the steps of the Congress building, in front of a bored video crew, and we went back to Canaveral and then to the Moon. Why not? By then Mike had convinced me about what was going to happen. There would be plenty of work for us.
We signed up as part of a roving seismology team, placing remote stations at various points around the Moon’s equator. The Exawatt plant had been dismantled and a monitoring station built on its site to try and track the period of the black hole, which some one had labelled Mendeleev X-1. Mike was as happy as I had ever seen him; he was getting some of the raw data and doing his own calculations on the black hole’s accretion rate and orbital path within the Moon. He stayed up long after our workday was over, hunched over his slate in the driving chair of our rolligon, with sunlight pouring in through the bubble canopy while I tried to sleep in the hammock stretched across the cabin, my skin itching with the Moon dust which got everywhere, and our Moon suits propped in the back like two silent witnesses to our squabbling. His latest best estimate was that the Moon had between two hundred and five thousand days.
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