The median time of the galaxy was one value. The galaxy itself was a clock that indicated the hour of its age. But in places of the greatest intensity of gravitation, galactic time underwent violent changes. There were boundaries at which it stopped altogether. These were the Schwarzschild spheres—the black surfaces of collapsed stars. Event horizons. An object approaching such a horizon would begin to stretch in the eyes of a distant observer; it would disappear before touching the surface of the black hole, because time, dilated by gravitation, displaced light toward the infrared and then to longer and longer wavelengths, until finally not one reflected photon returned to the eye of the watcher. The black hole trapped within its horizon every particle and every scrap of light forever.
In any case, a traveler approaching a black hole would be pulled apart, along with his ship, by the growing gravitation. Tidal forces there would lengthen any material object to a thread, and from the accretion disk formed around the black sphere that thread would go into a nose dive from which there was no return.
Flybys past the collapsar star were impossible—along any trajectory: the tidal forces would kill the travelers and rip their ship to pieces. The ship could be the densest cosmic dwarf, a neutron star, a globe of atomic nuclei packed together into a solid, a solid compared with which the hardest steel would be as attenuated as a gas: it would make no difference. Even such a globe the collapsar would pull out into a spindle shape, and would tear and swallow it in an instant, leaving behind only the death-throe flares of X rays escaping into space.
Collapsars that arose from stars a few times heavier than the Sun were thus like sudden guillotines to wayfarers. If, however, the mass of a black hole was a hundred or a thousand times that of the Sun, the gravitation at its horizon could be as weak as Earth's. No immediate danger would threaten the ship that ventured there, and the crew, moving toward such a horizon, could completely fail to notice it. But they would never be able to emerge from beneath that unseen shell. A ship drawn into a giant collapsar would be annihilated, plummeting to the center, in a matter of days or hours, depending on the massiveness of the trap.
The astrophysics at the close of the twentieth century drew such theoretical models of gravitational graveyards. But, as usually happened in the history of knowledge, the models proved insufficient. The reality was more complex. First, quantum mechanics had to be taken into account: every black hole gave off radiation. The larger the black hole, the weaker the radiation. Giant black holes, usually found at the centers of galaxies, would also eventually die, though their "quantum evaporation" might take a hundred billion years. They would be the final relics of the former stellar splendor of the Universe.
Further diversification of black holes was discovered by subsequent calculation and simulation. A star, when it collapsed, its weakened centrifugal radiation no longer able to counteract its gravity, did not immediately assume the shape of a sphere. It oscillated, like a drop alternately flattened to a disk and then pulled into a cigar shape. This vibration was very brief, the frequency depending on the mass. The collapsar behaved like a gong—that struck itself. But a gong at rest could be made to vibrate by a blow. A black sphere, similarly, could be set to oscillating again—by sidereal engineering. One had to know the method and possess sufficient power, on the order of 1044 ergs, which would be beamed in such a way as to put the sphere in resonance. For what purpose? To create what the astrophysicists acquainted with the giant casually called a "temporal onion."
Just as the center of an onion was surrounded by layers of tissue, visible in cross section like the rings of a tree, so a collapsar in resonance was surrounded by gravitationally curved time—or, rather, by a complex stratification of space-time. To a distant observer a black hole appeared to vibrate like a tuning fork for several seconds. But for one who found himself in its vicinity, on a contour line of altered time, the readings of the galactic clock lost all meaning. Thus, if a ship came upon a black hole that warped the continuum multivalently, along a gradient, the ship could enter a bradychronality and remain for years in that zone of retarded time—before leaving the temporal port. To the eyes of the outside observer the ship would vanish upon reaching the black hole and, after its invisible stop on the bradychronality, emerge in nearby space.
For the entire galaxy, for everyone watching the resonating collapsar from a distance, it would seem to oscillate in seconds between disk and cigar, exactly as it had oscillated in its violent birth when it was a star collapsed by gravity after the nuclear furnace went out. Whereas to the ship on the bradychronality, time could come almost to a halt.
But this was not all. The collapsar, vibrating, behaved not like a perfectly elastic ball but, rather, like a nonuniformly distorting balloon on a bounce, due to the magnification of relativistic effects. Thus, with the bradychronalities, retrochronalities could appear: currents or rivers of time flowing backward. For distant observers neither one nor the other existed. To make use of these retardations or reversals of time, therefore, one had to enter them physically.
The Project planned to use the solitary collapsar above the constellation Harpy as a port for the Eurydice. The mission of the expedition was not to establish contact with just any civilization that lay within the interval of possible communication, but to catch a civilization that, like a skyward butterfly pursued by an entomologist, was on its way out the window, already fluttering at the upper edge. Indispensable for this operation was a parking place in time, at a distance from the inhabited planet, which would allow the human psychonauts to visit it before the civilization departed from Ortega and Nilssen's main road of development. To this end, the expedition was divided into three stages. In the first, the Eurydice would proceed to the collapsar in the constellation Harpy, chosen as a place for concealment and temporal maneuvers. The collapsar was named, appropriately, Hades—because the Eurydice would be preceded by an unmanned colossus, a missile to be used only once, the Orpheus. It was a gravity gun, a gracer (gravity amplification by collimated excitation of resonance). At a signal from the Eurydice, it would set the black hole oscillating according to the latter's own natural frequency and amplitude.
Although gigantic on the scale of Earth objects, the Orpheus was the tiniest speck compared with the mass of the collapsar it was to set in motion. But it could accomplish this through the phenomenon of gravitational resonance. Giving up its vibratory ghost to Hades, it would thereby induce in the collapsar a single contraction and dilation—whereupon that black hell, opening its abysses, would permit the Eurydice to enter and ride the vortex of bradychronal currents. But first it was necessary to verify, from the ship, that the five-light-year-distant Quinta was in the prime of its technological era, and to determine, from that diagnosis, the right moment to visit it. Having fixed the moment, the Eurydice would then make a temporal harbor for herself in Hades, which would now be in vibration from the gracer emission of the Orpheus. As the Orpheus had enough power for only one discharge of coherent gravity, annihilating itself in that discharge, the operation could not be repeated. If it did not succeed the first time—because of a navigational error in the temporal storm, an incorrect diagnosis of the rate of development of the Quintan civilization, or any other factor not taken into account—the expedition would be a fiasco. Which meant, in the best case, returning to Earth empty-handed.
The plan was further complicated by the decision to make use, within the hell of Hades, of retrochronalities, of time flowing in reverse of the time of the entire galaxy, so that the expedition could return to the vicinity of the Sun less than twenty years after takeoff, even though a thousand parsecs separated the Harpy from Earth. The exact date of return, of course, was indeterminate: a fraction of a second in the navigation through brady- and retrochronalities made a difference of years far from the presses and grinding mills of gravitation.
His mind could not accept these statements; they were fraught with paradox. The main paradox was as follows:
The Eurydice was to remain ab
ove the collapsar in nontime, or in a time different from the ordinary. The reconnoiterers would fly to Quinta and return: this would take more than seventy thousand hours, or roughly eight years. From the blow of the gracer, the collapsar was supposed to oscillate between a flattened disk and an elongated spindle for only a moment or two—to all distant observers. When the reconnoiterers returned, therefore, they would not find the ship in its collapsar harbor. The black hole would long before this have resumed the shape of a nonvibrating sphere. And yet the Hermes, leaving Quinta, was to find the mother ship in the temporal port, even though the port, having come into existence only to disappear immediately, would surely not be there when the Hermes got back. How could one thing be reconciled with the other?
"There are physicists," Lauger explained, "who claim to understand this the same way they understand what stones and cupboards are. What they understand, in fact, is only that a theory agrees with the experimental results, with measurements. Physics, my friend, is a narrow path drawn across a gulf that the human imagination cannot grasp. It is a set of answers to certain questions that we put to the world, and the world supplies the answers on the condition that we will not then ask it other questions, questions shouted out by common sense. And common sense? It is that which is understood by an intelligence using senses no different from those of a baboon. Such an intelligence wishes to know the world in terms that apply to its terrestrial, biological niche. But the world—outside that niche, that incubator of sapient apes—has properties that one cannot take in hand, see, sniff, gnaw, listen to, and in this way appropriate.
"For the Eurydice in her collapsar port, the flight of the Hermes will take a couple of weeks. For the crew of the Hermes, the flight will take one and a half years, more or less. That's three months to Quinta, a year on Quinta, and three months back. For observers located neither on the Hermes nor on the Eurydice, the Hermes will complete its mission in nine years, while the Eurydice will disappear from sight for the same amount of time. According to the time measured on board the mother ship, she will pass from Friday to Saturday, return to Friday, and then the collapsar will spit her out into space.
"Time will flow more slowly on the Hermes than on Earth because of its near-light speed. On the Eurydice, time, gravitationally dilated, will flow even more slowly, and then reverse: she will descend from a bradychronality to a retrochronality, and from there jump to a galactochronal line. Emerging, she'll rendezvous with the Hermes in an unfolded space-time continuum.
"If the Eurydice miscalculates by seconds, navigating the variochronalities, she will not rendezvous with the Hermes. There is no contradiction in this, so to speak, on the world's part. The contradictions arise from the disparity between a mind born in the negligible gravity of Earth and phenomena pertaining to gravities trillions of times greater—it is that simple. The world is ordered according to universal rules called laws of Nature, but the same rule may manifest itself differently at different intensities.
"Take, for example, a man falling into a black hole. For him, space takes on the aspect of time, because he is no longer able to retreat in it, just as you cannot step backward in terrestrial time—that is, into the past. It's impossible to imagine what such a fall would be like, assuming, of course, that one didn't perish immediately beneath the event horizon.
"I still believe that the world is arranged in our favor, since we can nevertheless gain mastery over things that run counter to our senses. Consider: a child masters a language without understanding the principles of its grammar, its syntax, or the internal contradictions of speech that are hidden from the speakers. (You've got me philosophizing now.) A man craves ultimate truths. Every mortal mind, I think, is that way. But what is ultimate truth? It's the end of the road, where there is no more mystery, no more hope. And no more questions to ask, since all the answers have been given. But there is no such place.
"The Universe is a labyrinth made of labyrinths. Each leads to another. And wherever we cannot go ourselves, we reach with mathematics. Out of mathematics we build wagons to carry us into the nonhuman realms of the world. It is also possible to construct, out of mathematics, worlds outside the Universe, regardless of whether or not they exist. And then, of course, one can always abandon mathematics and its worlds, to venture with one's faith into the world-to-come. People of the ilk of Father Arago occupy themselves with this. The difference between us and them is the difference between the possibility that certain things will come to pass and the hope that certain things will come to pass. My field deals with what is possible, accessible; his, with what is only hoped for, which becomes accessible, face-to-face, only after death. What did you learn when you died? What did you see?"
"Nothing."
"Therein lies the differentia specified between science and faith. As far as I know, the fact that those resurrected saw nothing has not shaken the dogmas of religion. The latest eschatology of Christianity holds that a person resurrected forgets his sojourn in the hereafter. That by an act of Divine Censorship (they don't put it in that way, of course) man is forbidden to hop back and forth between this world and the next. Credenti non fit iniuria. If it is worth living by such a stretchable faith, as Arago does, how much easier it is to accept the paradoxes that allow you to pay a visit to the Quintans. Trust in physics the way Arago trusts in his religion. Though physics, unlike religion, is fallible. The choice is yours. Consider. And now go—I have work to do."
It was midnight when he got back to his cabin. He thought, in turn, about Lauger and the monk. The physicist was where he belonged—but the other? What did the monk hope for, or count on? Missionary work? Had modern theology indeed built an annex to accommodate the extraterrestrial recipients of God's bounty, and was Arago to be its spokesman? Why did he say, in the conversation, that evil might reign there?
Only now did it dawn on him: the fear in which the man must be living. Not fear for himself—fear for his religion. The monk could consider Redemption a gift intended only for humanity, while participating in an expedition to nonhuman beings, to a place, in other words, where his Gospel did not reach. He could think that. And, believing in God's omnipresence, he therefore would believe in the omnipresence of individual evil, because the demon who tempted Christ predated the Annunciation and Immaculate Conception. Then did the monk carry his dogmas with him, the dogmas by which he lived, to put them in jeopardy?
He shook his head and sighed. Lauger he could ask any question—but the monk, no. The Gospel made no mention of what Lazarus had to relate after his resurrection. And so he himself could in no way assist Father Arago, though he had risen from the dead. Religion, in self-defense, gave such resurrections a different, secular, this-worldly name, and therefore was not shaken. Not that he was any expert on religion. But he understood the painful isolation of the monk, for he himself had been isolated, a helpless, passive castaway taken on board by chance. Though no longer.
He began to undress for bed, listening to the silence of the Eurydice. She flew near the speed of light. Soon she would be reversing the drive. The clocks in all the quarters would start the countdown, giving the crew time to lie on their bunks, on their backs, and strap themselves in. The spheres of the hull would make a 180-degree turn inside their armored segments. Everything would spin—a moment of confusion, vertigo—then steady, once more still and peaceful. Rather than lash the stern, the flame of the drive would then hurtle along the bow, forward. Communication with Earth would improve somewhat because of this. News would reach the Eurydice, news many years old, of those whom the crew had left behind on Earth. He would receive no such laser letter, having no one left on Earth. Instead of a past, however, he had a future, a future for which it was worth living.
The prehistory of the expedition was full of conflict. The project had had a multitude of opponents. Its chance of success, calculated variously, could not be great. A catalogue of the accidents that in one way or another could cause the destruction of the expedition numbered in the thousands.
The financial side of the project occasioned a rumbling no less than Titan's upon the takeoff of the Eurydice. The traveler, in his reading, skipped these preliminary crises involving the building of the ships and the repercussions on Earth, such as the manufacturing defects that led to political corruption scandals. What did this matter to him, who was on board and on his way?
On the other hand, he studied the history of astronautics—records of transsolar flights and unmanned probes to Alpha Centauri, and accounts filled with the names of the workers of Grail and Roembden—in the hope that he might recognize among them people he had once known well, and possibly be able to follow the thread of that recognition back to the enigma of himself. There were moments, before sleep or on waking, when he felt close to remembering, particularly since in more than one dream he knew who he was. But all he retained, waking, was the empty certainty of that identity.
A year passed. The Eurydice, braking, lost its near-light speed relative to the collapsar, which now loomed like a real hole—an absence of stars—in the sky. Training, learning, reading, he abandoned his efforts to remember. And yet, though he was now chosen to be one of the copilots of the Hermes, in his dreams at night—about which he told no one—he was still the man who had entered Birnam Wood.
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