Cordelia contemplated this in silence, then asked hesitantly, “But how much computation will you be able to do?”
“In total?” Gisela shrugged. “That depends on details of the structure of spacetime at the Planck scale — details we won’t know until we’re inside. There are some models that would allow us to do the whole Tiplerian thing in miniature: infinite computation. But most give a range of finite answers, some large, some small.”
Cordelia was beginning to look positively gloomy. Surely she’d known about the Divers’ fate all along?
Gisela said, “You do realise we’re sending in clones? No one’s moving their sole version into Cartan Null!”
“I know.” Cordelia averted her eyes. “But once you are the clone … won’t you be afraid of dying?”
Gisela was touched. “Only slightly. And not at all, at the end. While there’s still a slender chance of infinite computation — or even some exotic discovery that might allow us to escape — we’ll hang on to fear of death. It should help motivate us to examine all the options! But if and when it’s clear that dying is inevitable, we’ll switch off the old instinctive response, and just accept it.”
Cordelia nodded politely, but she didn’t seem at all convinced. If you’d been raised in a polis that celebrated “the lost flesher virtues”, this probably sounded like cheating at best, and self-mutilation at worst.
“Can we go back now, please? My father will be awake soon.”
“Of course.” Gisela wanted to say something to this strange, solemn child to put her mind at ease, but she had no idea where to begin. So they jumped out of the scape together — out of their fictitious light cones — abandoning the simulation before it was forced to admit that it was offering neither the chance of new knowledge, nor the possibility of death.
***
When Prospero woke, Gisela introduced herself and asked what he wished to see. She suggested a schematic of Cartan Null; it didn’t seem tactful to mention that Cordelia had already toured Chandrasekhar, but offering him a scape that neither had seen seemed like a diplomatic way of side-stepping the issue.
Prospero smiled at her indulgently. “I’m sure your Falling City is ingeniously designed, but that’s of no interest to me. I’m here to scrutinise your motives, not your machines.”
“Our motives?” Gisela wondered if there’d been a translation error. “We’re curious about the structure of spacetime. Why else would someone dive into a black hole?”
Prospero’s smile broadened. “That’s what I’m here to determine. There’s a wide range of choices besides the Pandora myth: Prometheus, Quixote, the Grail of course … perhaps even Orpheus. Do you hope to rescue the dead?”
“Rescue the dead?” Gisela was dumbfounded. “Oh, you mean Tiplerian resurrection? No, we have no plans for that at all. Even if we obtained infinite computing power, which is unlikely, we’d have far too little information to recreate any specific dead fleshers. As for resurrecting everyone by brute force, simulating every possible conscious being … there’d be no sure way to screen out in advance simulations that would experience extreme suffering — and statistically, they’re likely to outnumber the rest by about ten thousand to one. So the whole thing would be grossly unethical.”
“We shall see.” Prospero waved her objections away. “What’s important is that I meet all of Charon’s passengers as soon as possible.”
“Charon’s … ? You mean the Dive team?”
Prospero shook his head with an anguished expression, as if he’d been misunderstood, but he said, “Yes, assemble your ‘Dive team.’ Let me speak to them all. I can see how badly I’m needed here!”
Gisela was more bewildered than ever. “Needed? You’re welcome here, of course … but in what way are you needed?”
Cordelia reached over and tugged at her father’s arm. “Can we wait in the castle? I’m so tired.” She wouldn’t look Gisela in the eye.
“Of course, my darling!” Prospero leant down and kissed her forehead. He pulled a rolled-up parchment out of his robe and tossed it into the air. It unfurled into a doorway, hovering above the ocean beside the pier, leading into a sunlit scape. Gisela could see vast, overgrown gardens, stone buildings, winged horses in the air. It was a good thing they’d compressed their accommodation more efficiently than their bodies, or they would have tied up the gamma ray link for about a decade.
Cordelia stepped through the doorway, holding Prospero’s hand, trying to pull him through. Trying, Gisela finally realised, to shut him up before he could embarrass her further.
Without success. With one foot still on the pier, Prospero turned to Gisela. “Why am I needed? I’m here to be your Homer, your Virgil, your Dante, your Dickens! I’m here to extract the mythic essence of this glorious, tragic endeavour! I’m here to grant you a gift infinitely greater than the immortality you seek!”
Gisela didn’t bother pointing out, yet again, that she had every expectation of a much shorter life inside the hole than out. “What’s that?”
“I’m here to make you legendary!” Prospero stepped off the pier, and the doorway contracted behind him.
Gisela stared out across the ocean, unseeing for a moment, then sat down slowly and let her feet dangle in the icy water.
Certain things were beginning to make sense.
***
“Be nice,” Gisela pleaded. “For Cordelia’s sake.”
Timon feigned wounded puzzlement. “What makes you think I won’t be nice? I’m always nice.” He morphed briefly from his usual angular icon — all rib-like frames and jointed rods — into a button-eyed teddy bear.
Gisela groaned softly. “Listen. If I’m right — if she’s thinking of migrating to Cartan — it will be the hardest decision she’s ever had to make. If she could just walk away from Athena, she would have done it by now — instead of going to all the trouble of making her father believe that it was his idea to come here.”
“What makes you so sure it wasn’t?”
“Prospero has no interest in reality; the only way he could have heard of the Dive would be Cordelia bringing it to his attention. She must have chosen Cartan because it’s far enough from Earth to make a clean break — and the Dive gave her the excuse she needed, a fit subject for her father’s ‘talents’ to dangle in front of him. But until she’s ready to tell him that she’s not going back, we mustn’t alienate him. We mustn’t make things harder for her than they already are.”
Timon rolled his eyes into his anodised skull. “All right! I’ll play along! I suppose there is a chance you might be reading her correctly. But if you’re mistaken … ”
Prospero chose that moment to make his entrance, robes billowing, daughter in tow. They were in a scape created for the occasion, to Prospero’s specifications: a room shaped like two truncated square pyramids joined at their bases, panelled in white, with a twenty-M view of Chandrasekhar through a trapezoidal window. Gisela had never seen this style before; Timon had christened it “Athenian Astrokitsch.”
The five members of the Dive team were seated around a semi-circular table. Prospero stood before them while Gisela made the introductions: Sachio, Tiet, Vikram, Timon. She’d spoken to them all, making the case for Cordelia, but Timon’s half-hearted concession was the closest thing she’d received to a guarantee. Cordelia shrank into a corner of the room, eyes downcast.
Prospero began soberly. “For nigh on a thousand years, we, the descendants of the flesh, have lived our lives wrapped in dreams of heroic deeds long past. But we have dreamed in vain of a new Odyssey to inspire us, new heroes to stand beside the old, new ways to retell the eternal myths. Three more days, and your journey would have been wasted, lost to us forever.” He smiled proudly. “But I have arrived in time to pluck your tale from the very jaws of gravity!”
Tiet said, “Nothing was at risk of being lost. Information about the Dive is being broadcast to every polis, stored in every library.” Tiet’s icon was like a supple jewelled statue carved from ebon
y.
Prospero waved a hand dismissively. “A stream of technical jargon. In Athena, it might as well have been the murmuring of the waves.”
Tiet raised an eyebrow. “If your vocabulary is impoverished, augment it — don’t expect us to impoverish our own. Would you give an account of classical Greece without mentioning the name of a single city-state?”
“No. But those are universal terms, part of our common heritage — ”
“They’re terms that have no meaning outside a tiny region of space, and a brief period of time. Unlike the terms needed to describe the Dive, which are applicable to every quartic femtometre of spacetime.”
Prospero replied, a little stiffly, “Be that as it may, in Athena we prefer poetry to equations. And I have come to honour your journey in language that will resonate down the corridors of the imagination for millennia.”
Sachio said, “So you believe you’re better qualified to portray the Dive than the participants?” Sachio appeared as an owl, perched inside the head of a flesher-shaped wrought-iron cage full of starlings.
“I am a narratologist.”
“You have some kind of specialised training?”
Prospero nodded proudly. “Though in truth, it is a vocation. When ancient fleshers gathered around their campfires, I was the one telling stories long into the night, of how the gods fought among themselves, and even mortal warriors were raised up into the sky to make the constellations.”
Timon replied, deadpan, “And I was the one sitting opposite, telling you what a load of drivel you were spouting.” Gisela was about to turn on him, to excoriate him for breaking his promise, when she realised that he’d spoken to her alone, routing the data outside the scape. She shot him a poisonous glance.
Sachio’s owl blinked with puzzlement. “But you find the Dive itself incomprehensible. So how are you suited to explain it to others?”
Prospero shook his head. “I have come to create enigmas, not explanations. I have come to shape the story of your descent into a form that will live on long after your libraries have turned to dust.”
“Shape it how?” Vikram was as anatomically correct as a Da Vinci sketch, when he chose to be, but he lacked the tell-tale signs of a physiological simulation: no sweat, no dead skin, no shed hair. “You mean change things?”
“To extract the mythic essence, mere detail must become subservient to a deeper truth.”
Timon said, “I think that was a yes.”
Vikram frowned amiably. “So what exactly will you change?” He spread his arms, and stretched them to encompass his fellow team members. “If we’re to be improved upon, do tell us how.”
Prospero said cautiously, “Five is a poor number, for a start. Seven, perhaps, or twelve.”
“Whew.” Vikram grinned. “Shadowy extras only; no one’s for the chop.”
“And the name of your vessel … ”
“Cartan Null? What’s wrong with that? Cartan was a great flesher mathematician, who clarified the meaning and consequences of Einstein’s work. ‘Null’ because it’s built of null geodesics: the paths followed by light rays.”
“Posterity,” Prospero declared, “will like it better as ‘The Falling City’ — its essence unencumbered by your infelicitous words.”
Tiet said coolly, “We named this polis after Élie Cartan. Its clone inside Chandrasekhar will be named after Élie Cartan. If you’re unwilling to respect that, you might as well head back to Athena right now, because no one here is going to offer you the slightest cooperation.”
Prospero glanced at the others, possibly looking for some evidence of dissent. Gisela had mixed feelings; Prospero’s mythopoeic babble would not outlive the truth in the libraries, whatever he imagined, so in a sense it hardly mattered what it contained. But if they didn’t draw the line somewhere, she could imagine his presence rapidly becoming unbearable.
He said, “Very well. Cartan Null. I am an artisan as well as an artist; I can work with imperfect clay.”
As the meeting broke up, Timon cornered Gisela. Before he could start complaining, she said, “If you think three more days ofthat is too awful to contemplate, imagine what it’s like for Cordelia.”
Timon shook his head. “I’ll keep my word. But now that I’ve seen what she’s up against … I really don’t think she’s going to make it. If she’s been wrapped in propaganda about the golden age of fleshers all her life, how can you expect her to see through it? A polis like Athena forms a closed trapped memetic surface: concentrate enough Prosperos in one place, and there’s no escape.”
Gisela eyed him balefully. “She’s here, isn’t she? Don’t try telling me that she’s bound to Athena forever, just because she was created there. Nothing’s as simple as that. Even black holes emit Hawking radiation.”
“Hawking radiation carries no information. It’s thermal noise; you can’t tunnel out with it.” Timon swept two fingers along a diagonal line, the gesture for “QED.”
Gisela said, “It’s only a metaphor, you idiot, not an isomorphism. If you can’t tell the difference, maybe you should fuck off to Athena yourself.”
Timon mimed pulling his hand back from something biting it, and vanished.
Gisela looked around the empty scape, angry with herself for losing her temper. Through the window, Chandrasekhar was calmly proceeding to crush spacetime out of existence, as it had for the past six billion years.
She said, “And you’d better not be right.”
***
Fifty hours before the Dive, Vikram instructed the probes in the lowest orbits to begin pouring nanomachines through the event horizon. Gisela and Cordelia joined him in the control scape, a vast hall full of maps and gadgets for manipulating the hardware scattered around Chandrasekhar. Prospero was off interrogating Timon, an ordeal Vikram had just been through himself. “Oedipal urges” and “womb/vagina symbolism” had figured prominently, though Vikram had cheerfully informed Prospero that as far as he knew, no one in Cartan had ever shown much interest in either organ. Gisela found herself wondering precisely how Cordelia had been created; slavish simulations of flesher childbirth didn’t bear thinking about.
The nanomachines comprised only a trickle of matter, a few tonnes per second. Deep inside the hole, though, they’d measure the curvature around them — observing both starlight and signals from the nanomachines following behind — then modify their own collective mass distribution in such a way as to steer the hole’s future geometry closer to the target. Every deviation from free fall meant jettisoning molecular fragments and sacrificing chemical energy, but before they’d entirely ripped themselves apart they’d give birth to photonic machines tailored to do the same thing on a smaller scale.
It was impossible to know whether or not any of this was working as planned, but a map in the scape showed the desired result. Vikram sketched in two counter-rotating bundles of light rays. “We can’t avoid having space collapsing in two directions and expanding in the third — unless we poured in so much matter that it collapsed in all three, which would be even worse. But it’s possible to keep changing the direction of expansion, flipping it ninety degrees again and again, evening things out. That allows light to execute a series of complete orbits — each taking about one hundredth the time of the previous one — and it also means there are periods of contraction across the beams, which counteract the de-focusing effects of the periods of expansion.”
The two bundles of rays oscillated between circular and elliptical cross-sections as the curvature stretched and squeezed them. Cordelia created a magnifying glass and followed them “in”: forwards in time, towards the singularity. She said, “If the orbital periods form a geometric series, there’s no limit to the number of orbits you could fit in before the singularity. And the wavelength is blue-shifted in proportion to the size of the orbit, so diffraction effects never take over. So what’s there to stop you doing infinite computation?”
Vikram replied cautiously, “For a start, once colliding photons start
creating particle-antiparticle pairs, there’ll be a range of energies for each species of particle when it will be travelling so much slower than lightspeed that the pulses will begin to smear. We think we’ve shaped and spaced the pulses in such a way that all the data will survive, but it would only take one unknown massive particle to turn the whole stream into gibberish.”
Cordelia looked up at him with a hopeful expression. “What if there are no unknown particles?”
Vikram shrugged. “In Kumar’s model, time is quantised, so the frequency of the beams can’t keep rising without limit. And most of the alternative theories also imply that the whole setup will fail eventually, for one reason or another. I only hope it fails slowly enough for us to understand why, before we’re incapable of understanding anything.” He laughed. “Don’t look so mournful! It will be like … the death of one branch of a tree. And maybe we’ll gain some knowledge for a while that we could never even glimpse, outside the hole.”
“But you won’t be able to do anything with it,” Cordelia protested. “Or tell anyone.”
“Ah, technology and fame.” Vikram blew a raspberry. “Listen, if my Dive clone dies learning nothing, he’ll still die happy, knowing that I continued outside. And if he learns everything I’m hoping he’ll learn … he’ll be too ecstatic to go on living.” Vikram composed his face into a picture of exaggerated earnestness, deflating his own hyperbole, and Cordelia actually smiled. Gisela had been beginning to wonder if morbid grief over the fate of the Divers would be enough to put her off Cartan altogether.
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