Blakes 7 - Afterlife

by Tony Attwood

  ‘And I gave it a bit of personality. Just to make it more friendly.’

  ‘Any other bits of the ship you’ve decided to play with in the last few days?’ demanded Avon. ‘Navigational instruments only responding to the Galaxy’s known gambling dens? Monitors only showing the outside environment when they think it is pretty?’

  ‘Nothing especially,’ Vila announced.

  Korell came to his rescue. ‘Do you want this ship down or do you want to have a row with Vila?’ she asked Avon.

  ‘Put us down,’ came the terse reply.

  ‘Blake,’ said the pilot.

  ‘I know,’ replied the computer.

  6

  ‘There are only three ways back into our own time and space,’ Avon announced. ‘First, through a white hole. The trouble is that a white hole is the point at which material sucked into a black hole emerges, and that’s difficult to find without the right equipment, which we don’t have; and impossible to enter, unless held stable by a six-mile-square building created by technology which we certainly do not possess, and which is also not widely available even to the upper hierarchy of the Federation.’ He looked at Korell. She wondered if he was giving her a clue. ‘Then there are stable black holes and rotating black holes.’

  ‘I thought all black holes were things to be avoided,’ said Vila.

  ‘What you think and what is, are normally two different things,’ Avon retorted. ‘Non-rotating black holes lead to singularities at which matter is stripped to nothingness, before being spat out through a white hole. And, apart from that, the tidal forces on a stable black hole would tear the ship apart before we even got near it.

  ‘Spinning black holes, however, lead to wormholes connecting up all possible universes. They are the links between past, present and future in each and every one of the eleven dimensions.’

  ‘So we go looking for a rotating black hole, and dive in,’ Vila announced. Then he frowned. ‘How do we find one if it’s a black hole against a black sky?’

  ‘For a start,’ Korell told him, ‘we can’t just find any spinning black hole. This is all outside my field but the little astro-physics I do know suggests we need a black hole that is big enough not to tear us apart.’

  ‘The tidal force of a spinning black hole is inversely proportional to the square of the mass of the hole,’ said Blake.

  ‘Eh?’ said Vila.

  ‘That will teach you to go round handing out gratuitous personalities that offer information,’ Korell told him.

  ‘Well I only did it because Orac kept refusing to talk to us.’

  ‘The bigger the black hole, Vila, the lower the gravity field output, which is the main danger of the ship being torn apart,’ the computer continued. ‘So go and look for the biggest black hole you can find – one that is at least two thousand times larger than the Earth’s sun. There is only one such object.’

  ‘Oh. Where?’

  ‘At the centre of the Galaxy.’ Korell and Blake spoke simultaneously. All travellers knew about that black hole; and knew about avoiding it, too.

  ‘There is just one other possibility, however,’ continued Korell. ‘We don’t have to go back to our own universe.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Vila.

  ‘The question should be “why?”’ Korell told him. ‘I don’t seem to recall us having vast hordes of valuable riches stashed away there. Nor yet some loved ones who need to be returned to.’

  Avon was guarded in his reply. ‘But there is the question of unfinished business,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps you would care to give us details?’

  ‘The business is private,’ Avon told her.

  ‘Since it involves risking everything to enter a black hole, and risking everything again to come out in the right time and the right place, and since I don’t recall having heard that the insides of black holes are covered with signposts pointing the way to each reality, it seems quite a risk without a full knowledge of why.’

  ‘You would like to stay?’ asked Avon.

  ‘Possibly,’ Korell replied.

  ‘And what do you offer us if we stay? Life on board this freighter until we grow senile and can’t work the controls; or until we get so mad with each other we end up locked in our own rooms never daring to come out for fear of being talked to by a computer programmed by Vila? Is that what you want?’

  ‘I offer nothing, Avon. What do you want? The chance to settle old scores?’

  ‘But in this reality,’ said Vila, ‘there are parallels to our own galaxy?’ Korell confirmed the supposition. ‘Then there might be another me.’

  ‘That seems a good enough reason for going back,’ said Avon.

  ‘And Blake might still be alive in this reality.’

  ‘And working as a farm hand on a frontier world having never had a revolutionary thought in his life,’ Korell added. ‘What’s the point of this line of thought, Vila? People may exist, or may not. If you want real parallels you’ve got to get into that black hole and find a reality closer to the one we know than this one is. If you choose to stay it is to make this reality into what you want it to be. You create your life here, and be glad of it.’

  ‘There is another factor.’ The voice was from Blake.

  ‘Yes Blake?’ said Vila intently, anxious to calm matters down, and to maintain his affiliation with the computer.

  ‘The ship, and all of you, are in a universe from which you do not originate. Although this position is stable at the moment, you cannot stay here indefinitely.’

  ‘How long have we got?’ asked Korell.

  ‘In eighty-seven hours twenty-three minutes the molecular structure of the ship will start to deteriorate. The structure will become unstable to the extent of not fulfilling necessary functions twenty-three hours seventeen minutes after that.’

  ‘How...’ Korell’s voice was cut off by Blake. Following Vila’s instructions it always gave relevant information.

  ‘If the ship leaves at once and heads directly for the black hole at the centre of the galaxy at maximum speed then the black hole will be reached within seventy-nine hours.’ -

  ‘Not much time to spare,’ said Korell.

  ‘So we turn back,’ said Avon. ‘Now!’

  ‘You have a way of getting what you want,’ Korell told him. ‘You haven’t been tampering with Blake by any chance?’

  Avon looked at Korell for a moment. ‘You are a beautiful woman,’ Avon told her. ‘Don’t reduce your beauty by stupidity. Take the ship up, we are wasting time.’

  Long journeys, as far as Vila was concerned, were becoming slightly more acceptable. For the most part Avon and Korell were deeply involved in computer work. Now Vila could work with KAT and talk to Blake. It helped.

  The problem that Avon and Korell each strove to solve in their separate ways was apparent even to Vila with his almost total lack of computer awareness. They had to find a way of entering the black hole, a way of getting through, and worst of all a way of ensuring that they not only emerged but actually emerged in the right time zone and the right continuum. It was a problem beyond the abilities of any individual to solve. Indeed it was beyond the abilities of most thirteenth generation computers.

  However, both sets of computations were finished with several hours to spare, and fortunately for the flight deck Korell and Avon produced analyses that agreed. What Avon would have done had Korell actually disputed with him in the area of computer-based analysis Vila dreaded to think. As the solutions were compared Vila continued to contemplate his new awareness: in every reality another Vila exists; another version of himself with a slightly different persona making himself slightly different. How would he get on with himself – but not himself? Pretty well, he thought. But how would Avon get on with Avon? And how would Avon react if he came face to face with another Blake? Another killing? Reconciliation?

  Afterwards, however, Vila’s tales were not of multi-person populated realities but of the pain of high-gravity pressure, of the screams from fusi
on engines asked to do too much, of the way the display screens and the Blake computer could only give out images of streaks of light rather than clear pictures of passing stars, crammed closely together at the galactic centre. He would speak of the looming blackness of the hole itself growing ever larger, and the essential nature of his work relaying data to Korell as she tried to steer Revenge into the very centre of the hole itself. Then he told of the all-pervading blackness – the nothingness showing up on the screens and the long battle to turn the ship precisely so that they exited the way they had come. But, as the calculations had shown, they had to leave at a velocity just different enough to allow them to compensate for the injection of power that Revenge had picked up through the white hole. Then the build-up of pressure and noise once more as they left the black hole and re-emerged into the galaxy. Vila would conclude his story with a word about Korell.

  Throughout the whole tale he would imply that it was he, Vila, who had got them through, passing on information right and left, keeping a calm head whilst others shouted, acting as a focus for information within the ship. But he would end with a little side line, a trivial incident designed to show his modesty in praising another, and yet leaving his listeners craving more information about the black hole. ‘Korell,’ he would say, ‘fascinated me. As we left the hole and came back into the real world, she calmly tapped into the communications channels and listened. And that was the whole point.’ (At this juncture he would turn from face to face as if to suggest that anyone closely following his narrative should have realised that point, but for those less well endowed intellectually, he’d spell it out anyway.) ‘We didn’t know if we had come back into our galaxy or not. And she just listened for a few moments, and then calmly said, "I think this is the right place." I find that quite remarkable.’ And then with a half smile he would sit back in his chair, take another good sip at the drink which was given him by hosts and hostesses grateful to have such a tale recounted by one actually there, and wait for the praise and the questions.

  Fortunately for Vila, Korell rarely spoke of the journey through the hole, for the simple reason that she never found a need to talk of times past, and when she did speak it was to recall some of her more glorious occasions. For her the past was mainly irrelevant, unless it was used to gain an insight into a problem of the present, or contained within itself a reason for her own present actions. To Korell the only real interest was the future. Reminiscing was a waste of time. But she would sit and listen to others tell of the past, for that gave her a lot of good information concerning the person speaking, information that might come in handy one day. She never gave out such free hints about herself.

  Avon too kept silent about the affair. What Vila failed to report, because in reality he had spent much of the journey with his eyes closed and mind very firmly shut, was that Avon had used the last few hours of time they had in the alternative galaxy doing what Vila claimed Korell had done upon their return – listening to communications chatter. Avon had even sent out a few messages himself, trying to learn not only about the galaxy they had entered but also trying to find out the state of the Federation and whatever administration there was in that alternative reality. He also sent out three requests for information about current myths and legends, and received informative, if baffled, replies.

  Once through the hole and certain that they were back in their own Galaxy in their own time zone, Korell faced her dilemma once more. In the end she asked Avon directly for information. He looked at the woman, lifted his right hand, pointed a finger in familiar style, but then stopped himself. He turned away. ‘We have time distort, we have plasma shielding, we do not have teleport. I thought that was the next move – or do you have something else in mind?’

  ‘I have nothing in mind...’ she replied tentatively. Was there some double meaning in the use of that word?

  ‘Then leave the planning to me. But perhaps you wish to leave the ship now?’

  ‘Not after I took so long to find you, Avon.’

  ‘Why did you find me? If you had just wanted Orac you would have left us long ago.’

  ‘Do you want me to leave?’

  The question seemed to surprise Avon. He turned to face her squarely. ‘Live on this ship alone with Vila, a wine-drinking hand computer and a main computer answering to the name Blake? You are a pilot, and you are prepared to converse with Vila. What more could I ask?’

  ‘The question is not what could you ask, but what could you do? If I am to pilot this ship again it would be helpful to know where I am taking it and why.’

  ‘To find the materials we need for teleport.’

  ‘Not good enough, Avon. Try again.’

  Avon’s calmness disappeared. ‘It does not have to be good enough,’ he said aggressively. ‘As I have said, you are welcome for the moment to work on this ship. Your skills are good, you are useful. The same can be said of Vila. But make no mistake, you are not indispensable.’

  ‘So you consider it your ship, do you? And what if I said I wanted to go somewhere else?’ Her voice continued to be as sweet and gentle as ever.

  ‘You would start to be tiresome which normally you are not. But I will put you down on the nearest planet. Remember you owe me from Skat – I don’t owe you. And I’ll tell you when I am collecting.’

  Korell seemed to consider her position for a moment. ‘Is it really a teleport you are after?’ she asked. When Avon did not respond, she continued half to herself. ‘And after that? When you have built up another ship to rival those you have lost before? What will you do? Track down Servalan?’

  ‘I told you I have unfinished business.’

  ‘Does it really matter to you so much?’

  ‘Certain things matter. We could stay forever drifting in space, watching ourselves decay. Or we could decide to look after ourselves. Revenge against Servalan on its own is meaningless. But revenge allied to a new plan can have some kind of meaning.’

  ‘So you really are another Blake?’

  ‘Blake wanted to kill Servalan to build a new and better Galaxy in the glorious name of the Freedom Party. But the Party was corrupted by its own plans even before Blake started using Liberator. The Party that Blake had so much feeling for still wanted to control people, to tell them what to do. That power warped his mind. He wanted to destroy Star 1 – do you know what that meant? Star 1 maintained the environment on hundreds of planets. It made worlds that were otherwise useless into places that could be lived on. And he wanted to destroy that, causing the death of countless millions. That is the result of the mindless battle of two political ideals, two political maniacs, Blake against Servalan – each perfectly assured that what they did was for the best.’

  ‘And you are different.’

  ‘Well now, you have to decide for me.’

  ‘All right, let me tell you. Blake felt that he could never be a member of the Federation’s kind of society. He had to oppose the Federation, but he did so in the name of the grand new society that the Revolution would bring about, with him, presumably, as one of the great leaders. Blake would become a benevolent dictator, which is why you disliked him even more than Servalan. For Servalan, on the other hand, there was no doubt. She wanted to be supreme ruler of everything, with total power of life and death over the million billion souls in the Galaxy. You can understand that. It doesn’t appeal to you but you can understand that. But you saw Blake as aiming to gain power through pretending to liberate – that was how you saw him. You saw him as a cheat. You felt all revolutionaries were phony, but Blake was the worst, because he presented himself as something different from the Federation. In Blake’s new society everyone would be told how free they were and they would all really believe it. They wouldn’t drug the atmosphere any more because everyone would feel for Blake without that sort of treatment. You could see through that. Avon would still be the outlaw in Blake’s society just as he was in Servalan’s.

  ‘What do you have left, Avon? To be an exile? You thought of that.
You thought of taking a ship that was self-sufficient, and just driving it on your own outside society, existing, being. A hermit.

  ‘So what does Avon do? The life within society to you is meaningless. Conforming to the wishes of the Federation of the Average Man is meaningless. The rebellion of Blake is meaningless. Exile is meaningless. You don’t want to change anything, except perhaps to kill off Servalan. Everyone else is a fool except Avon.’

  Korell looked at the man she had just analysed, but he did not look back. Instead he was staring at the display screens in front of him.

  ‘I have received a message.’ It was the voice of the Blake computer.

  ‘I see it,’ said Avon still looking at the monitors.

  ‘It is from Federation Space Station Sub-command at grid reference 953 002,’ persisted the computer. ‘They are demanding information on our flight pattern and on authorisation for our present whereabouts.’

  ‘Since when did the Federation demand information like that? They normally just shoot first, and then ask you to submit a reference sheet in quadruplicate,’ said Vila.

  ‘The logical answer,’ Korell told him, ‘is that there is some authorised but unidentifiable space traffic around here. I wonder what it’s up to.’

  ‘The message is being repeated, and the demand for a reply is getting stronger,’ announced Blake.

  Avon pressed the necessary key. ‘We are the space freighter Revenge bound for the planet MD2551R carrying supplies of protein supplement.’

  ‘On what authorisation?’ came the disembodied voice.

  ‘On the authorisation of the Parliament and Supreme Council of the Planet Rijks,’ said Avon.

  ‘You will take your craft into orbit around the star lying at grid reference 993 008 so that you can be boarded and your credentials checked.’

  Vila got worried. ‘Where did you get that name from?’ he demanded.

  ‘From the map,’ Avon answered shortly.

  ‘Well let’s go there, or rather let’s go somewhere. Anywhere.’