Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  Uncomfortable in too-tight collar he sat on the musty-smelling leather seats peculiar to solicitors’ offices and listened as Mr. Cameron ruefully and with great sorrow read out names, sums, and properties.

  “And it is my desired wish that pending approval by the Faculty Board, Dr. Hugh MacMichaels should succeed me as Project Director of the Vivaldi mission. Because” —Mr. Cameron coughed solicitously—“unlike those other bastards in the department, Hugh actually gives a damn about the dream of reaching the stars.”

  As Dr. Hugh sat on the peculiar leather chairs listening to the words that made him at twenty-seven director of a mission that would not bear fruit before his fortieth birthday (and made Tom Maclvor and Barbara Caldwell implacable enemies, which saddened him for he liked all men to be his friends), Vivaldi crossed the orbit of the asteroids and headed for Jupiter.

  T–45 32400 KM

  “We have simulations coming up on the screen … now.”

  “Gravity sensors registering flux curve maximizing to exponential point-source. Nemesis is there, all right.”

  “Course computer adjusting orbit to intercept trajectory.”

  “Kirkby Scott’s limousine has left the airport and is on its way, ETA in twenty-five minutes.”

  “Should have long-range images coming through false color enhancement any minute now.”

  In the jingle-jangle of jargons and lingos—French accents, German accents, Italian accents, the accents of singsong Scandinavians and soft Irishmen, polyglot Beneluxers, anonymous Swiss and lisping Spaniards, Dr. Hugh’s Lowland Scots is almost swamped in the Babel.

  “Anything we can have a look at yet?”

  Alain Mercier, chief of staff at ESA Dharmstadt, competent and unflappable, pries loose Dr. Hugh’s question from the tapestry of tongues and replies,

  “Pictures coming on screen now. There she is … there she is …”

  And suddenly no matter how many words fill the control room, there can never be enough of them to express the feeling of the soul looking upon a black hole.

  Dr. Hugh’s first impression is that of ceaselessness—ceaseless swirling, ceaseless spinning, ceaseless activity, a swirling whirling rainbow with a heart of darkness to which everything is drawn down and annihilated. He has never seen anything as dark as the heart of the black hole. Save possibly death. He cannot take his eyes away from the harlequin rings of gas and cometary ice swirling around the collapsar, a maelstrom of elements grinding each other finer and finer like the mills of God, forcing each other hotter, hotter into glowing plasma before the final agonized shriek into the invisibility of the event horizon.

  This is it, Gemma, the nightmare on a long winter’s night, remember? This is Nemesis.

  * * * *

  Trolling in late and drunk after a celebratory departmental piss-up, something akin to guilt had urged Dr. Hugh to peep in at his daughter aged eight. As he switched off her electric blanket (always falling asleep with it on, someday she’ll electrocute herself) he saw bright eyes watching him.

  “Daddy.”

  “What, wee hons?”

  “Dad, I can’t sleep.”

  Wavering between hug, kiss, goodnight, close door and what-is-it, how-about-a-story? a sudden gutquake of whisky made him sit down sloshily on the bed.

  “Dad, are you going to tell me a story then?”

  “Aren’t you a bit old for stories?”

  “Not ghost stories.” Bright eyes met bleary eyes and father and daughter felt themselves caught up in a shiver of mutual conspiracy. No one is ever too old for a ghost story.

  “Okay. A ghost story, and a true one.”

  “Wow!”

  “One that happened to me today.”

  “Dad!” Then, disbelievingly, “Really?”

  “Truly. Now listen. Now, you’ve heard stories about the ghosts of people, and the ghosts of animals, and the ghosts of trains, and even the ghosts of ships, but this one is about the ghost of a star.”

  “A ghost star?”

  “Exactly. You see, when stars get very old, billions of years old, they go like people do when they get old. They fall in on themselves, collapse inwards, shrivel up. But unlike people, well, any people I know of, sometimes a star collapses in on itself so far and so fast that it draws a big hole down after it.”

  “Like when the water swirls down the plughole in the shower?”

  “Very like that. The star falls in on itself and dies but it leaves the hole behind, like the smile on the Cheshire cat, a ghost star, and we call these ghost stars collapsars. Can you say that?” He had trouble saying it himself.

  “Collapsars.” Words fascinated his daughter; the longer the word, the better.

  “That’s it. Now, this collapsar is like a bottomless pit. Anything that gets too close is pulled in and falls and falls and falls forever and nothing that falls in can ever get out. The collapsar swallows up everything, even light, which is why another name for them is black holes, and the more it swallows the bigger and stronger it gets and the bigger and stronger it gets the more it can draw in and swallow.”

  “Dad …”

  “Yes, wee hons.” He was growing accustomed to the darkness in the bedroom, he could discern Gemma’s face in the swirling dots of dark.

  “You sound scared.”

  And all of a sudden he was scared, terrified.

  “Dad.” A pause. “You said this was a true story.”

  “I did.”

  “Does that mean there are such things as collapsars?”

  “We found the first one today.” Or rather, two American scientists at UCLA acting on information from a Japanese skywatch probe acting on information from a Soviet orbital X-ray telescope, found one today.

  “Is that why you sound scared?”

  He could not answer, and in the silence Gemma asked, “Dad, has Vivaldi anything to do with this c—c—clasp—”

  “Collapsar. Wee hons, Vivaldi’s going there.”

  He would never forget the little shriek of fear.

  “Dad, Vivaldi’s going to fall and fall and fall forever …”

  “No no, hons, Vivaldi’s not going to fall into the black hole. Vivaldi’s just going to go round the edge of the collapsar and take a look. It won’t fall in.”

  But sitting on his daughter’s bed with the autumn gales howling round the house he felt that in saying Vivaldi was going to the black hole he was saying that he was going there himself, and he saw what it was that had terrified him in Gemma’s three words: the sudden, fearful image of himself falling falling down down down spinning spinning round round round, dwindling into a little spinning homunculus of a father, falling into the black hole. Dread paralyzed him; mortality had tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Then is Vivaldi not going to look at the comets any more?”

  He thanked God for Gemma’s question.

  “No, and yes. You see, as the collapsar moves around the sun—which takes it millions of years, it’s so far away—it passes through the big cloud of comets, remember, the … ?”

  “Oort Cloud.” Gemma repeated the name with him, mouth shaping the big, round words, eyes shining with intellectual excitement.

  “And it just so happens that the region it’s passing through is very close to the place where Vivaldi was originally meant to go. Imagine that, wee hons, first spacecraft to go to a black hole.”

  He knew Gemma took a great pride in his work. Not every Daddy in Corstorphin Primary P-5 piloted spaceships to the edge of the solar system. Even if that Daddy happened to be as pissed as a boiled owl.

  “Here’s a question, Gemma. What do you know about dinosaurs?”

  “You mean Tyrannosaurus Rex and Brontosaurus and all that? What’s that got to do with Vivaldi?”

  “Wait and see. Now, why aren’t there two dinosaurs here talking astrophysics at two in the morning instead of two humans?”

  “Because a comet hit the earth and killed them all.”

  “Ah-hah! Now, back to the Oort Cloud. Whe
n the black hole passes through the comets, sometimes it passes so close it pulls them in and swallows them, but most of the time it just knocks them out of the cloud and sends them in towards the sun. Now, the last time this happened was sixty-five million years ago in the time of the dinosaurs, and you know what became of them. This time it’s our turn. Maybe we’ll be lucky and no comets will come close to the earth. And maybe we won’t.”

  Dr. Hugh saw the fear on his daughter’s face, darker than the darkness in the room, and despised his drunken mouth for frightening her so. Yet this was the world he had bequeathed his eight-year-old child and every loving father’s eight-year-old children: a world of extinction raining out of the sky.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, wee hons?”

  “Does this collapsar have a name?”

  “Yes it does. The people who found it called it Nemesis.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s the name of an old Greek goddess who brought vengeance down on the earth.”

  “Dad, I’m scared.”

  “Gemma love, so am I.”

  T – 22 15840 KM

  At sixteen thousand kilometers and closing, Nemesis fills the Big Wall. Half-hypnotized, Dr. Hugh numbly asks for data. Data will keep it away, keep it remote and distant, half a light-year distant in the Oort Cloud, for projected in garish false color on the video wall it is intimidating, frightening.

  “Angular rotation 24000 pi radians per second.”

  “Circumference of collapsar event horizon fifteen kilometers.”

  “Estimated mass: four solar masses.”

  “Radiation temperature estimated 1.47 million K; energy density, 2.2×1025 eV per liter.”

  Gemma, help me. Nemesis is more dreadful than he has ever imagined. Its every aspect is orders of magnitude greater than the estimates he and Kirkby Scott made when the decision was taken to reroute Vivaldi to the collapsar. He is not now certain whether Vivaldi can survive the encounter with the black hole. All his current guesstimates on survival are based on those hopelessly optimistic, conservative assumptions and even then those probabilities were only in the order of sixty percent in favor of little Vivaldi. The odds chalked up by the bookies down in the staff canteen express an altogether different climate of confidence.

  Vivaldi was not built for this, he tells himself. Vivaldi was designed for a leisurely stroll among the comets, not a headlong plunge to within twelve kilometers of the event horizon of a black hole. Everything about Nemesis is too much; too much mass, too much heat, too much radiation, too much gravity, too big, too close, too soon.

  Damn you, black hole, you are too much and you are going to swallow twenty years of my life as wantonly as you would swallow a grain of comet dust.

  He remembers; remembers taking Gemma to see a Disney film when she was quite small. In that film there had been a snake with whirlpool eyes that drew in and hypnotized and Gemma had screamed and screamed and screamed until he took her out of the cinema. Now as he stands before the whirlpool eye of Nemesis he understands her fear.

  “Dr. MacMichaels …”

  Uh? Andrea Mencke, from Personnel.

  “Dr. MacMichaels, just to inform you that Kirkby Scott has arrived and is in the building.”

  * * * *

  One evening Dr. Hugh arrived home at 26 Milicent Crescent after a busy day on the edge of the solar system to find a stranger in a tasteless but utterly fashionable plaid suit sitting in his favorite armchair chatting amiably to a rapt nearly-sixteen Gemma and sipping a glass of Dr. Hugh’s very very best single-malt.

  “Hello, Dad.” Gemma greeted him with a kiss and a Hello-Daddy-Bear hug. “This is Kirkby Scott.”

  “Good evening, sir,” said the plaid-suit single-maltsipper, standing and enthusiastically shaking hands. “Kirkby Scott, UCLA. I believe you’re the one wants to send a spaceship to my collapsar.”

  His name was Kirkby Scott; he came from the University of California, Los Angeles, though he was born in Wisconsin, where apparently everyone in California was born; he was twenty-eight years old; he had won the youngest-ever doctorate in astrophysics from the University of California, for which he and his partner Paul Mazianzky, now of the Jet Propulsion Lab, Pasadena, had made a study of the orbits and perturbations of orbits of comets in the Oort Cloud on the hypothesis that the sun possessed a distant companion, tentatively christened Nemesis (pretty good name, no?), with the sub-hypothesis, subsequently proved, that this Nemesis was a black-body object, possibly (now verified) a moderately sized collapsar of approximately three solar masses, and that on account of this epochal discovery (words like “Nobel” had been bandied) UCLA, NASA, and the ESA had decided in their corporate wisdom that he, Kirkby Scott, was to be Dr. Hugh MacMichaels’s new partner on the Vivaldi Project.

  To which, Dr. Hugh MacMichaels of the Vivaldi Project said,

  “You what?”

  He went to the Space Lords of the ESA and the Space Lords of the ESA said things like “Americans feeling left out,” and “They did discover it, after all.” They also said things like “no place for dog-in-the-manger attitudes” and “brotherhood of science.” More revealingly, they said “got some deep-space pulse-fusion thing going on over there—Orion, they call it—powered starflight, all that; you scratch my back, all that stuff?” And, sinisterly, they said, “old allies” and “Western-bloc solidarity” and, most sinisterly of all, “directive from the Highest Authorities.”

  “Doesn’t the position of Project Director entitle me to some say-so?” said Dr. Hugh.

  “Sorry, Hugh,” said the Space Lords of the ESA. “It’s a political decision.” And that was that. Dr. Hugh shuttled home to Edinburgh hating both Kirkby Scott the flesh and Kirkby Scott the idea. He poured out his cup of bile to Moira, but, self-absorbed with the darkness that had taken root in the empty places within her, she was no longer interested in either his work or him. So he poured it out again to Gemma and she listened patiently and when he had emptied himself of his anger at the European Space Agency, Kirkby Scott, and Moira, she said,

  “I rather like him, Dad.”

  “Like him? Like that … that … dandy, that … popinjay, that poseur?”

  “He has a good heart, Dad.”

  Dr. Hugh did not appreciate then that his daughter possessed the gift of reading hearts, a kind of spiritual X-ray vision to which all intents were open and from which no secrets could be hid, and so he went away hating Kirkby Scott, idea and man. But day by day, week by week, year by year, his resentment of his partner mellowed and softened and became first admiration, then open liking, and he came to realize that a man can wear a flashy plaid suit (forgivable through fashion), sit in someone’s favorite armchair (forgivable through ignorance) and swill someone’s very very best single-malt and chat up his dear and only daughter (unforgivable under any circumstances), and have a good heart.

  Two days after Gemma’s nineteenth birthday, with Vivaldi six months from the black hole. Dr. Hugh and Kirkby Scott were guests of honor at the 43rd International Astronautical Conference in Houston, Texas. Dr. Hugh was very excited by the prospect of going to Houston. He had piloted spaceships to the edge of the stars but had never crossed the Atlantic. Gemma was excited for him too.

  “Got passport, air-sickness pills, glasses, cheap thriller?”

  He nodded, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

  “Right, then. Be good, Dad, and knock them dead.”

  The 43rd International Astronautical Conference was a triumph. Even half a year from the black hole, Vivaldi had still pushed Death Stars, orbital factories, Jupiter ramjets, Martian go-bots, and even pulse-fusion Orion stardrives into the wings and Drs. Hugh and Kirkby—one tweedy, beardy, amiably confused; the other confident, garrulous, the picture of fashion in paisley one-piece and matching duster coat—under the spotlight center stage.

  At the reception afterwards everyone wanted to shake Dr. Hugh’s hand and tell him how he reminded them of Sean Connery (the only James Bond), and
Dr. Hugh, blurred and mellow from too much California Moselle, smiled and laughed and talked the veriest drivel with Respected Nobel Laureates and Sharp Young Men from NASA and Doyens of Astronautics and was just easing into conversation with an extremely attractive woman journalist from New Scientist (so sorry, his subscription had run out years ago) when the bellboy came round paging Dr. Hugh MacMichaels paging Dr. Hugh MacMichaels telephone call at reception telephone call at reception and he left the extremely attractive woman journalist holding his glass and went to answer the telephone and on the other end was Moira telling him that Gemma had been killed that morning in a car accident on the M62.

  T – 10 7200 KM

  Casual, fashionable, elegant in his yellow designer one-piece, Kirkby Scott skips down the steps and slips in beside Dr. Hugh.

  “Sorry,” he whispers. “Stuck in a stack over Düsseldorf while they sorted out an air-traffic controllers’ dispute, would you believe? And would you believe that sitting up there in our coffee room is Carl Silverman, I mean, Carl Silverman …”

  “I know,” says Dr. Hugh. “He interviewed me.”

  “Interviewed you? Hey, ho … I’ll ask you about it later. Well, here I am. Okay, tell me what’s going on.”

  Dr. Hugh nods at the Big Wall.

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Shoot, that close? How long to the impact probes?”

  “They go at T-minus-four.”

  “How’s Vivaldi bearing up to it?”

  “Gravity shear and dust impact are causing her to wobble off optimum course.”

  “Well, the onboard’s held up this long, it can hold another ten minutes.”

  “Gravity shear approaching upper safety limits,” advises an unapproachable Swiss Fräulein at the telemetry board.

  “Gravity shear? Gravity shear? We hadn’t figured on the gravity shear getting so strong so far out; here, let’s have a look, what kind of beast have we got out there?”

  Kirkby Scott studies the facts and figures on Nemesis with hisses of increasing disbelief. Dr. Hugh studies the simulator display schematics on the Big Wall simulator. There is ugly, bucket-of-bolts Vivaldi, rolling and tumbling towards the Schwarzchild limit: safe, but Dr. Hugh’s imagination superimposes on the videoscreen the hundred alternative scenarios in which Vivaldi is reduced to glittering shards.