“You’re making it up.”
“You damn fool security guy, me weapons inspector. We’ve suspected the People’s Democratic Republic of Congo used Penrose weapons in their war with the Democratic People’s Republic of Congo for some time. They had guns capable of lobbing hundred tonne shells full of plague germs at Pretoria from a distance of four thousand kilometres, for instance. When we examined those guns after UNPEFORCONG overran their positions, what we found didn’t fit. They had magnetic accelerators in their barrels, but at the sort of muzzle velocities they’d have had to have been using, the magnets in the barrels would only have been any use in aiming, not in getting the payload up to speed. And the breech of each weapon had been removed. Something had been accelerating those projectiles, but it wasn’t magnetism, and it wasn’t gunpowder. The projectiles were big, and they were moving fast. You remember that outbreak of airborne rabies in New Zealand two years back? That was one of theirs. A Congolese shell fired too hot and went into orbit. The orbit decayed. The shell came down. Thirteen years after the war. Gunpowder and magnetism don’t do that.”
“So what was it?”
“A Penrose accelerator. You get yourself a heavy-duty rotating mass, big enough to have stuff orbit round it, and you whirl ordnance round those orbits, contrary to the direction of the mass’s rotation. Half of your ordnance separates from the payload, and drops into the mass. The other half gets kicked out to mind-buggering velocities. The trouble is, none of this works unless the mass is dense enough to have an escape velocity greater than light.”
“A black hole.”
“Yes. You have yourself thirty-nine charged rotating black holes, formerly used as artillery accelerators, now with nowhere to go. Plus another hole lodged precariously on the back of a tractor on the public highway halfway between here and Djelo-Binza. And the only way for us to find enough energy to get rid of them, I imagine, would be to use another black hole to kick them into orbit. They also give off gamma, almost constantly, as they’re constantly absorbing matter. You point one of those UxB defuser tractors at them and throw the safety on the gun, and – ”
“JESUS.” Grosjean stared at the ground floor entrance where his men had been preparing to throw heavy artillery shells at the problem, jumped up, and began frantically waving his arms for them to stop. “OuI! OuI! arrÊTe! arrÊTe! And we thought getting rid of nuclear waste was difficult.”
“looks easy to me,” said Mativi, nodding in the direction of the highway. Two trucks with UNSMATDEMRECONG livery, their suspensions hanging low, had stopped just short of the military cordon in the eastbound lane. Their drivers had already erected signs saying light heat here for dollars, and were handing out clear resin bricks that glowed with a soft green light to housewives who were coming out of the darkened prefabs nearby, turning the bricks over in their hands, feeling the warmth, haggling over prices.
“Is that what I think it is?” said Grosjean. “I should stop that. It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”
“Don’t concern yourself with it right now. Those bricks can only kill one family at a time. Besides,” said Mativi gleefully, “the city needs power, and Jean-Baptiste’s men are only supplying a need, right?”
Ngoyi, still in the passenger seat of the Hyundai, stared sadly as his men handed out radionuclides, and could not meet Mativi’s eyes. He reached in his inside pocket for the gun he had attempted to kill Mativi with, and began, slowly and methodically, to clear the jam that had prevented him from doing so.
“Once you’ve cordoned the area off,” said Mativi, “we’ll be handling things from that point onwards. I’ve contacted the IAEA myself. There’s a continental response team on its way.”
In the car, Ngoyi had by now worked the jammed bullet free and replaced it with another. At the Boeing, Grosjean’s jaw dropped. “You have teams set up to deal with this already?”
“Of course. You don’t think this is the first time this has happened, do you? It’s the same story as with the A-bomb. As soon as physicists know it’s possible, every tinpot dictator in the world wants it, and will do a great deal to get it, and certainly isn’t going to tell us he’s trying. Somewhere in the world at a location I am not aware of and wouldn’t tell you even if I were, there is a stockpile of these beauties that would make your hair curl. I once spoke to a technician who’d just come back from there…I think it’s somewhere warm, he had a sun-tan. He said there were aisles of the damn things, literally thousands of them. The UN are working on methods of deactivating them, but right now our best theoretical methods for shutting down a black hole always lead to catastrophic Hawking evaporation, which would be like a thousand-tonne nuclear warhead going off. And if any one of those things broke out of containment, even one, it would sink through the Earth’s crust like a stone into water. It’d get to the Earth’s centre and beyond before it slowed down to a stop – and then, of course, it’d begin to fall to the centre again. It wouldn’t rise to quite the same height on the other side of the Earth, just like a pendulum, swinging slower and slower and slower. Gathering bits of Earth into itself all the time, of course, until it eventually sank to the centre of the world and set to devouring the entire planet. The whole Earth would get sucked down the hole, over a period which varies from weeks to centuries, depending on which astrophysicist you ask. And you know what?” – and here Mativi smiled evilly. This was always the good part.
“What?” Grosjean’s Bantu face had turned whiter than a Boer’s. From the direction of the car, Mativi heard a single, slightly muffled gunshot.
“We have no way of knowing whether we already missed one or two. Whether one or two of these irresponsible nations carrying out unauthorized black hole research dropped the ball. How would we know, if someone kept their project secret enough? How would we know there wasn’t a black hole bouncing up and down like a big happy rubber ball inside the Earth right now? Gravitational anomalies would eventually begin to show themselves, I suppose – whether on seismometers or mass detectors. But our world might only have a few decades to live – and we wouldn’t be any the wiser.
“Make sure that cordon’s tight, louis.”
Grosjean swallowed with difficulty, and nodded. Mativi wandered away from the containment site, flipping open his mobile phone. Miracle of miracles, even out here, it worked.
“Hello darling…No, I think it’ll perhaps take another couple of days…Oh, the regular sort of thing. Not too dangerous. Yes, we did catch this one…Well, I did get shot at a little, but the guy missed. He was aiming on a purely Euclidean basis…Euclidean. I’ll explain when I get home…Okay, well, if you have to go now then you have to go. I’ll be on the 9am flight from Kinshasa.”
He flicked the phone shut and walked, whistling, towards the Hyundai. There was a spiderweb of blood over the passenger side where Ngoyi had shot himself. Still, he thought, that’s someone else’s problem. This car goes back into the pool tomorrow. at least he kept the side window open when he did it. made a lot less mess than that bastard lamant did in Quebec city. and they made me clean that car.
He looked out at the world. “Saved you again, you big round bugger, and I hope you’re grateful.”
For the first time in a week, he was smiling.
First published in Interzone 198.
WILLIAM SHUNN
William Shunn (born August 14, 1967) is a science fiction writer and computer programmer. He was raised in a Latter-day Saint household, the oldest of eight children. He attended the Clarion Workshop in 1985. In 1986, he served a mission to Canada for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but was arrested for making a false bomb threat, for the purpose of preventing his fellow missionary from returning home.
Shunn received a B.S. in computer science at the University of Utah in 1991. He went to work for WordPerfect Corporation and was part of the team that developed WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS (the word processor's final major DOS version, released in 1993). In 1995, he moved from Utah to New York City. He left the LDS Church at the same time and c
reated one of the earliest ex-Mormon web sites.
Shunn's first professional short story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1993. He has been nominated once for the Hugo Award and twice for the Nebula Award. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, he created what may have been the first online survivor registry.
The Practical Ramifications of Interstellar Packet Loss, by William Shunn
Fuhrmann closely scans the ragged line of debarking passengers--their befuddled eyes dim with the aftereffects of cryosleep, their gaits unsteady in the space station's light gravitational field, their auras betraying forlornness and bewilderment as palpably as gray clouds. As each one passes, a matching name scrolls by at the periphery of Fuhrmann's vision, along with ancillary data such as point of origin, education, and net worth. As always, he marvels at the number of people who arrive at Netherview Station with literally nothing, or less than nothing, and at how far and ill-prepared they have come for the privilege.
Fuhrmann has never traveled outside his home system, and cannot imagine ever doing so.
Abruptly, a blinking name draws his attention. The young man just leaving decontamination looks as lost and helpless as all the rest, but Fuhrmann views him in a different light. Tall, gangly, hands like spatulas, this one projects an innocence that the others do not. He may be confused and out of place, but his eyes still glow with curiosity, his face still radiates wonder. With his mussed hair and puffy eyes, the young man resembles a child who has just awakened. Only his unshaven cheeks and his height spoil the illusion.
Time to spoil more than just the illusion, Fuhrmann thinks.
He steps forward.
Cove blinked in the bright light of the arrival lounge, his skin still tingling from the microlasers of the decontamination chamber. After having been herded this way and that with his fellow passengers through doors and tubeways and elevators and processing stations, he found the openness of the lounge disorienting and a little intimidating. What now? There was no obvious place to go, no easy direction to take. He felt like a tiny packet of information spilling out through a rupture in the interstellar communications network, lost and unrecoverable, floating free in space and never to find its way home. Idly he wondered if a redundant copy of himself routed along a different path might eventually reach his destination in his place...
Whoa, pal! Cove told himself. You're really out there! When you start confusing work metaphors with real life, it's time to come back to the ground.
He wasn't lost. As far away from home as he was, there was supposed to be someone here to meet him, someone familiar. He glanced around at the thin crowd of travelers in disposable jumpsuits like his, at their greeters clad in unfamiliar clothing and decked out with strange body modifications, and amid all the wonders he searched for a glimpse of any familiar face. He wasn't certain quite whom he should be looking for, but he knew she would be around somewhere. He knew it.
Probably. Possibly.
Cove became aware of a pain in his chest, an ache far deeper and more insidious and basic than any physical complaint could be, like a lost piece of his heart, a missing breath.
Maybe she'd be here, maybe not.
Probably not.
"Miles Covio?" said a voice near his shoulder.
Cove turned, startled, a smile forming on his lips and breaking up again as he realized that the voice belonged to a shaven-headed man in a bright caftan and not to a woman. "Um, yeah?" he said with a vague disquiet. "That's me."
"Wolf Fuhrmann," said the man, raising his hands palms-forward, as if someone were pointing a firearm at him.
Cove stared for a moment, then belatedly realized that he was expected to copy the man's gesture of greeting. "Um, hi."
"I'm with Himmlischen Kurieren," said Fuhrmann. He drew a holographic badge from a pocket of his caftan. "I'll be helping you get all settled and oriented."
"Himmlischen Kurieren?" Cove asked, giving the badge a cursory glance. "Oh, wait, Celestial Messengers." His new employers.
Fuhrmann, who came to about the level of Cove's chin, nodded curtly. "Quite so. I must say, this is a true honor. Your doctoral dissertation was transmitted to us when the Godspeed entered the system, and it was brilliant, just brilliant. 'Colophon Routing and Redundancy: New Protocols for Interstellar Data Exchange.' Did I get the title right? Very innovative material. I especially liked the section on the practical ramifications of interstellar packet loss. Put a very human face on the whole business." He smiled with what seemed to be an attempt at camaraderie. "You've got seventy years of developments to catch up on, of course--well, twice that, with the travel lag--but you're going to be very, very welcome here. We'll be pleased to put you right to work. Er, Miles? Are you all right?"
Cove shook his head. He had spaced out there for a minute. "I'm sorry. I was expecting..." The hitch in his breath caused his mouth to twist ruefully. "Well, I'm a little thrown, because to be perfectly honest I was expecting someone else."
Fuhrmann cocked his head to one side in a strangely birdlike way, and Cove noticed that the man's eyes did not match in color. The iris of the right eye was bright blue, but the iris of the left glinted like chrome, and the white seemed ... well, too white in contrast with the other eye. "I'm not aware of who that could possibly be," said Fuhrmann.
Cove shrugged helplessly, concentrating, and then it came to him. "Helen. Helen Pratt." He shook his head. "I keep losing her name." To say nothing of the memory of her face.
"Temporary dysnomia is a frequent side effect of prolonged cryosleep," said Fuhrmann. "It may be quite disorienting for a while, but should pass in a matter of days. Now, tell me about this woman. Who is she?"
"She ... well ..." Cove felt his face heat and his lips curve into a smile, which he tried to resist. "She's my friend from Enoch." But saying the words, the ache of his love and the attendant self-consciousness changed to something far more vast, and he comprehended for perhaps the first time the size of the gulf he had crossed. By the time he could ever return to his home planet, more than one hundred fifty years would have passed, and everyone he knew would be dead. Seventy light-years was not a distance to cross lightly. "She was supposed to be here," he finished quietly.
Fuhrmann regarded Cove for a moment with pursed lips. "Why don't I buy you some coffee, Miles?" he said at last. "You look like you could use some. We can pick up your personal effects in a little while."
The shorter man led Cove through an irising portal and into a wide corridor walled with white ceramic. The corridor curved upward in the far distance, and lush greenery overflowed planter boxes set into every possible niche. The corridor was not crowded, for which Cove was grateful; he had trouble getting around in the low gravity. It was easier to control his movements here at the outer rim of the station than it was in the weightlessness at the hub where they had docked, but he was still feeling only about half the g he was used to from Enoch. The slight counterspinward nudge imparted by the rotation of the station didn't help much, either.
Fuhrmann preceded Cove through a doorway in the opposite side of the corridor and into a small but cheery diner set amidst a stand of dwarf oaks. The tables and chairs seemed to be made of natural wood growing out of the floor, and the placemats and napkins resembled woven leaves. Fuhrmann purchased two bulbs of coffee from the autoserve and brought them back to the table where Cove was carefully maneuvering into a seat.
"You can dial up cream on the right side and sweetener on the left," said Fuhrmann, handing one of the bulbs to Cove. "If it's too hot, dial down the temp on the front." He sipped carefully from his own bulb. "Now, tell me, how does a young man from a planet like Enoch come to have a friend waiting for him on Netherview Station?"
"It wasn't for sure," Cove said reflexively.
"Even so."
Cove's gaze wandered to a nearby viewport sealed with superglass, beyond which a field of stars like diamond dust on black velvet swung sedately past. "You know the relocation stipend your company
offered? How it was enough for me plus a companion?"
"I do." Fuhrmann appeared to stare at a point in space about half a meter before his face. "But your records were updated shortly before the Godspeed docked. Only one passage has been charged--yours."
Cove's flesh felt suddenly twice as heavy as it should. He closed his eyes and released a long, slow breath. "Then she didn't come," he said.
"I don't follow," said Fuhrmann.
Cove leaned back in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair. "We were in love," he said. "At least I think I was, and I'm pretty sure she was. We were talking about partnering." He found the nipple on his bulb, took a pull of coffee without really tasting it. "I was in school, studying the Standard Curricula. When the compufessor granted me a master's degree in interstellar data exchange, it also spit out this automatic employment offer from Celestial--uh, from Himmlischen Kurieren. You know--'we've projected thus-and-such a need for researchers with your particular talents on Netherheim over the next two centuries, and we want you to come be a part of it all.'"
Fuhrmann nodded. "It still amazes me that people actually take us up on those offers--how close we come to hitting those projections."
"Yeah." Cove massaged the muscles behind his neck at the base of his skull. "Me, too, now that you mention it." Outside the viewport, the blue-gold limb of Netherheim was just swinging into view. So unlike green Enoch, and yet so oddly similar. "I knew I needed to come to Netherheim for the sake of my work, but it was so hard to ask Helen to come with me, to abandon everything she knew. Still, I couldn't imagine coming without her. Oh, God."
Cove took several breaths and another swallow of coffee. "But even when she agreed," he continued, "it was an almost impossible thing to arrange. Enoch has a lot of trouble sustaining its population, and the emigration laws make it really difficult to leave the planet, particularly if you're a woman. I finally got permission to come, but by the time Helen got permission there was no way for us to get passage on the same ship. The damn bureaucracy--just one more way the government tried to discourage us from leaving. We could both have waited together for an even later flight, but that might have taken two or three years.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 326