“But we are in great mystery,” First admitted, and it seemed to me that a note of sadness and bewilderment had crept into his mechanical-sounding voice. “We have come to what certainly is the right location. Yet nothing seems to be correct here. We find only this little iron star. And of our former planet there is no trace.”
I stared at that peculiar and unfathomable four-eyed face, that three-columned neck, those tight vertical mouths, and to my surprise something close to compassion awoke in me. I had been dealing with this creature as though he were a potential enemy capable of leading armadas of war to my world and conquering it. But in fact he might be merely a scholarly explorer who was making a nostalgic pilgrimage, and running into problems with it. I decided to relax my guard just a little.
“Have you considered,” I said, “that you might not be in the right location after all?”
“What do you mean?”
“As we were completing our journey toward what you call the iron star,” I said, “we discovered a planet forty light-years from here that beyond much doubt had had a great civilization, and which evidently was close enough to the exploding star system here to have been devastated by it. We have pictures of it that we could show you. Perhaps that was your home world.”
Even as I was saying it the idea started to seem foolish to me. The skeletons we had photographed on the dead world had had broad tapering heads that might perhaps have been similar to those of First, but they hadn’t shown any evidence of this unique triple-neck arrangement. Besides, First had said that his people had had several generations to prepare for evacuation. Would they have left so many millions of their people behind to die? It looked obvious from the way those skeletons were scattered around that the inhabitants of that planet hadn’t had the slightest clue that doom was due to overtake them that day. And finally, I realized that First had plainly said that it was his own world’s sun that had exploded, not some neighboring star. The supernova had happened here. The dead world’s sun was still intact.
“Can you show me your pictures?” he said.
It seemed pointless. But I felt odd about retracting my offer. And in the new rapport that had sprung up between us I could see no harm in it.
I told Lina Sorabji to feed her sonar transparencies into the relay pickup. It was easy enough for Cal Bjornsen to shunt them into our video transmission to the alien ship.
The Nine Sparg captain withheld his comment until we had shown him the batch.
Then he said, “Oh, that was not our world. That was the world of the Garvalekkinon people.”
“The Garvalekkinon?”
“We knew them. A neighboring race, not related to us. Sometimes, on rare occasions, we traded with them. Yes, they must all have died when the star exploded. It is too bad.”
“They look as though they had no warning,” I said. “Look: can you see them there, waiting in the train stations?”
The triple mouths fluttered in what might have been the Nine Sparg equivalent of a nod.
“I suppose they did not know the explosion was coming.”
“You suppose? You mean you didn’t tell them?”
All four eyes blinked at once. Expression of puzzlement.
“Tell them? Why should we have told them? We were busy with our preparations. We had no time for them. Of course the radiation would have been harmful to them, but why was that our concern? They were not related to us. They were nothing to us.”
I had trouble believing I had heard him correctly. A neighboring people. Occasional trading partners. Your sun is about to blow up, and it’s reasonable to assume that nearby solar systems will be affected. You have fifty or a hundred years of advance notice yourselves, and you can’t even take the trouble to let these other people know what’s going to happen?
I said, “You felt no need at all to warn them? That isn’t easy for me to understand.”
Again the four-eyed shrug.
“I have explained it to you already,” said First. “They were not of our kind. They were nothing to us.”
* * *
I excused myself on some flimsy excuse and broke contact. And sat and thought a long long while. Listening to the words of the Nine Sparg captain echoing in my mind. And thinking of the millions of skeletons scattered like straws in the tunnels of that dead world that the supernova had baked. A whole people left to die because it was inconvenient to take five minutes to send them a message. Or perhaps because it simply never had occurred to anybody to bother.
The families, huddling together. The children reaching out. The husbands and wives with hands interlocked.
A world of busy, happy, intelligent, people. Boulevards and temples. Parks and gardens. Paintings, sculpture, poetry, music. History, philosophy, science. And a sudden star in the sky, and everything gone in a moment.
Why should we have told them? They were nothing to us.
I knew something of the history of my own people. We had experienced casual extermination too. But at least when the white settlers had done it to us it was because they had wanted our land.
For the first time I understood the meaning of alien.
I turned on the external screen and stared out at the unfamiliar sky of this place. The neutron star was barely visible, a dull red dot, far down in the lower left quadrant; and the black hole was high.
Once they had both been stars. What havoc must have attended their destruction! It must have been the Sparg sun that blew first, the one that had become the neutron star. And then, fifty or a hundred years later, perhaps, the other, larger star had gone the same route. Another titanic supernova, a great flare of killing light. But of course everything for hundreds of light-years around had perished already in the first blast.
The second sun had been too big to leave a neutron star behind. So great was its mass that the process of collapse had continued on beyond the neutron-star stage, matter crushing in upon itself until it broke through the normal barriers of space and took on a bizarre and almost unthinkable form, creating an object of infinitely small volume that was nevertheless of infinite density: a black hole, a pocket of incomprehensibility where once a star had been.
I stared now at the black hole before me.
I couldn’t see it, of course. So powerful was the surface gravity of that grotesque thing that nothing could escape from it, not even electromagnetic radiation, not the merest particle of light. The ultimate in invisibility cloaked that infinitely deep hole in space.
But though the black hole itself was invisible, the effects that its presence caused were not. That terrible gravitational pull would rip apart and swallow any solid object that came too close; and so the hole was surrounded by a bright ring of dust and gas several hundred kilometers across. These shimmering particles constantly tumbled toward that insatiable mouth, colliding as they spiraled in, releasing flaring fountains of radiation, red-shifted into the visual spectrum by the enormous gravity: the bright green of helium, the majestic purple of hydrogen, the crimson of oxygen. That outpouring of energy was the death-cry of doomed matter. That rainbow whirlpool of blazing light was the beacon marking the maw of the black hole.
I found it oddly comforting to stare at that thing. To contemplate that zone of eternal quietude from which there was no escape. Pondering so inexorable and unanswerable an infinity was more soothing than thinking of a world of busy people destroyed by the indifference of their neighbors. Black holes offer no choices, no complexities, no shades of disagreement. They are absolute.
Why should we have told them? They were nothing to us.
After a time I restored contact with the Nine Sparg ship. First came to the screen at once, ready to continue our conversation.
“There is no question that our world once was located here,” he said at once. “We have checked and rechecked the coordinates. But the changes have been extraordinary.”
“Have they?”
“Once there were two stars here, our own and the brilliant blue one that was nearby. Our
history is very specific on that point: a brilliant blue star that lit the entire sky. Now we have only the iron star. Apparently it has taken the place of our sun. But where has the blue one gone? Could the explosion have destroyed it too?”
I frowned. Did they really not know? Could a race be capable of attaining an interstellar spacedrive and an interspecies translating device, and nevertheless not have arrived at any understanding of the neutron star/black hole cosmogony?
Why not? They were aliens. They had come by all their understanding of the universe via a route different from ours. They might well have overlooked this feature or that of the universe about them.
“The blue star—” I began.
But First spoke right over me, saying, “It is a mystery that we must devote all our energies to solving, or our mission will be fruitless. But let us talk of other things. You have said little of your own mission. And of your home world. I am filled with great curiosity, Captain, about those subjects.”
I’m sure you are, I thought.
“We have only begun our return to space travel,” said First. “Thus far we have encountered no other intelligent races. And so we regard this meeting as fortunate. It is our wish to initiate contact with you. Quite likely some aspects of your technology would be valuable to us. And there will be much that you wish to purchase from us. Therefore we would be glad to establish trade relations with you.”
As you did with the Garvalekkinon people, I said to myself.
I said, “We can speak of that tomorrow, Captain. I grow tired now. But before we break contact for the day, allow me to offer you the beginning of a solution to the mystery of the disappearance of the blue sun.”
The four eyes widened. The slitted mouths parted in what seemed surely to be excitement.
“Can you do that?”
I took a deep breath.
“We have some preliminary knowledge. Do you see the place opposite the iron star, where energies boil and circle in the sky? As we entered this system, we found certain evidence there that may explain the fate of your former blue sun. You would do well to center your investigations on that spot.”
“We are most grateful,” said First.
“And now, Captain, I must bid you good night. Until tomorrow, Captain.”
“Until tomorrow,” said the alien.
* * *
I was awakened in the middle of my sleep period by Lina Sorabji and Bryce-Williamson, both of them looking flushed and sweaty. I sat up, blinking and shaking my head.
“It’s the alien ship,” Bryce-Williamson blurted. “It’s approaching the black hole.”
“Is it, now?”
“Dangerously close,” said Lina. “What do they think they’re doing? Don’t they know?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I suggested that they go exploring there. Evidently they don’t regard it as a bad idea.”
“You sent them there?” she said incredulously.
With a shrug I said, “I told them that if they went over there they might find the answer to the question of where one of their missing suns went. I guess they’ve decided to see if I was right.”
“We have to warn them,” said Bryce-Williamson. “Before it’s too late. Especially if we’re responsible for sending them there. They’ll be furious with us once they realize that we failed to warn them of the danger.”
“By the time they realize it,” I replied calmly, “it will be too late. And then their fury won’t matter, will it? They won’t be able to tell us how annoyed they are with us. Or to report to their home world, for that matter, that they had an encounter with intelligent aliens who might be worth exploiting.”
He gave me an odd look. The truth was starting to sink in.
I turned on the external screens and punched up a close look at the black hole region. Yes, there was the alien ship, the little metallic sphere, the six odd outthrust legs. It was in the zone of criticality now. It seemed hardly to be moving at all. And it was growing dimmer and dimmer as it slowed. The gravitational field had it, and it was being drawn in. Blacking out, becoming motionless. Soon it would have gone beyond the point where outside observers could perceive it. Already it was beyond the point of turning back.
I heard Lina sobbing behind me. Bryce-Williamson was muttering to himself: praying, perhaps.
I said, “Who can say what they would have done to us—in their casual, indifferent way—once they came to Earth? We know now that Spargs worry only about Spargs. Anybody else is just so much furniture.” I shook my head. “To hell with them. They’re gone, and in a universe this big we’ll probably never come across any of them again, or they us. Which is just fine. We’ll be a lot better off having nothing at all to do with them.”
“But to die that way—” Lina murmured. “To sail blindly into a black hole—”
“It is a great tragedy,” said Bryce-Williamson.
“A tragedy for them,” I said. “For us, a reprieve, I think. And tomorrow we can get moving on the neutronium-scoop project.” I tuned up the screen to the next level. The boiling cloud of matter around the mouth of the black hole blazed fiercely. But of the alien ship there was nothing to be seen.
Yes, a great tragedy, I thought. The valiant exploratory mission that had sought the remains of the Nine Sparg home world has been lost with all hands. No hope of rescue. A pity that they hadn’t known how unpleasant black holes can be.
But why should we have told them? They were nothing to us.
David Drake’s RCN series (also known as the “Lt. Leary” series) consists of stand-alone novels and short stories centering around Daniel Leary, an officer in the Republic of Cinnabar Navy (RCN) and Adele Mundy, a librarian and spy. Drake describes it as an “SF version of the Aubrey/Maturin series” by Patrick O’Brian. More character driven than his Hammer’s Slammers, the plots of the RCN stories tend to be based on historical incidents. In his brand new story for us, which takes place before the first novel in the series, a fresh out of the academy Leary, his friend Pennyroyal, and a few fellow cadets invite trouble when they sneak off ship for a night of fun…
CADET CRUISE
DAVID DRAKE
Pennyroyal knew that Cadet Leary was supposed to have remained aboard the Swiftsure until 1700 hours with the rest of the Starboard Watch. That said, she’d gotten to know Daniel Leary pretty well during their three years at the Academy. When she couldn’t locate him in their accommodation block or the cable tier where he was supposed to be on duty until 1630, she suspected that Leary had managed to slip ashore with the Port Watch.
It was more out of whim than from any real expectation of finding the other cadet that Pennyroyal went out on the hull through a forward airlock. The Dorsal A antenna was raised while the Swiftsure was docked in Broceliande Harbor. Daniel was sliding down a forestay, his rigging gauntlets sparking against the steel wire. A bosun’s mate named Janofsky was following him down.
“You’re supposed to be inspecting cable, Leary,” Pennyroyal called, amazed and a little exasperated at what her friend got up to. “If an officer catches you fooling around in the sunshine, you’ll lose your liberty. At least your liberty.”
Daniel Leary wasn’t any more interested in astrogation theory than Pennyroyal herself was, but he had an obvious gift for astrogation. He could be a valuable officer of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy—if he weren’t booted out of the Academy before he graduated. Leary treated discipline the way he did religion: it was all very well for others, if they really wanted to go in for it.
“Pardon, ma’am, but that’s just what we’re doing,” said Janofsky, touching his cap. “I directed Cadet Leary to inspect the standing rigging of Dorsal A under my supervision.”
In theory the cadets were classed as landsmen: they were junior to able spacers, let alone to a warrant officer like Janofsky. In practice, outside of actual training many of the Swiftsure’s cadre treated cadets like the officers they would become when they graduated.
Now with the Republic of C
innabar and the Alliance of Free Stars in an all-out war, spacers were valuable commodities. It was necessary to provide cadets with practical experience before they were commissioned, but a training ship’s complement tended to be made up of personnel who for one reason or another could be spared from front-line combat vessels.
Some of the Swiftsure’s cadre had persistent coughs, stiff limbs, or were simply old: Janofsky probably wouldn’t see seventy again. Others drank or drugged or were a little funny in the head.
But no few were ring-tailed bastards who were doubly hard on cadets. Cadets had the chance of bright futures, which none of those in a training ship’s cadre could imagine would dawn for them.
“Ah,” said Pennyroyal. She didn’t believe the story, but it couldn’t be disproved if Janofsky was willing to swear to it. Captain Landrieu herself couldn’t punish Cadet Leary, and a veteran spacer like Janofsky knew that he was effectively beyond discipline. Old though he was, the bosun’s mate carried out his duties—both working ship and training—with a skill that set him above most of the cadre.
“Come to that, Penny,” Leary said, “you knocked off early yourself, not so?”
“I was on galley duty,” Pennyroyal said. “With three quarters of the crew ashore, there was bugger all to do by mid shift. Cookie excused me and the other cadets. I wanted to find you.”
Janofsky had gone below, leaving the two of them alone on the ship’s spine. Though the Swiftsure was nearly sixty years old, she was still a battleship. She loomed over not only the rest of the harbor traffic but the buildings of Broceliande, none of which were over six stories high.
Foret was subject to the Cinnabar Empire—a Friend of Cinnabar if you wanted to be mealy-mouthed. It was a pleasant enough planet but of no real importance in galactic politics, making it a natural port call for an RCN training vessel. Part of what an RCN officer needed to know was how to behave on worlds which had their own cultures. Foret provided that, and the trouble you could get into on Broceliande stopped short of being eaten by the locals. There were ports where that wasn’t true.
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