In the brilliant white-hot glare of yellows and reds that blazed up all around them, the eerie lack of color in the Cyaneans filled Toby with a sinking dread. He felt as though the bottom had fallen out of his stomach. Only Besen steadied him, holding from one side while Toby stood with the other arm around his father. There was nothing here for mere humans to do.
Ahead, the hoop plunged down into the gray, rippling expanse. And cut. Like a knife, it sheared through the ashen surface and deep, deep into the interior.
Released, the edges of the strange dusky surface pulled away. They curled away from the Cosmic Circle, peeling back.
But the hoop paid a price. It crumpled along its leading edge. The resistance of the turbulence dented and deformed it.
Toby could not guess what colossal energies grappled there. The sharpness of the Cosmic Circle was a mere atom wide, his Isaac Aspect said, but its tight curvature was more than equal to the gray, storming surges. It pierced the tossing turbulence, sending sputtering hot light in its wake.
“What . . . what do we do?” Killeen asked quietly.
Killeen made a sign to Jocelyn, who was watching him with round, frightened eyes. She turned the ship downward, into more of the blazing luminosity, toward the shifting gray sheet. Long moments passed as the grayness swelled like an impassable wall of strangely shifting stone.
They rushed into the shadowy gap carved by the hoop. To all sides peaks and valleys formed and dissolved, like mountains of ash made from burned bones.
Fringes of the stuff washed over Argo and brought dizzying, reeling moments when Toby thought he had been snatched up by his heels and shaken, upside down, hair fraying in the air. Crew vomited on the Bridge. Others howled with fright and nausea. The ship’s deep skeleton protested, popping and creaking.
But the long passage stayed open. Once cut, it peeled back to form new zones of contorted space-time. Argo sped after the glowing, crumpling hoop.
It seemed to take a long time to cross the thickness of the sliced Cyanean ghost-space. Besen puked and gasped, mouth gaping and messed. But Toby held on to his father, not to steady him but to simply know that he was there.
And then they were out, free. The hoop tumbled away, crushed. The Myriapodia ships banked after it, grasping at the battered cosmic string, turning back toward the poles of the entire rotating system.
Killeen found his voice. “Jocelyn. Try . . . try to follow them.”
“What?” Killeen’s mouth sagged.
“Look . . . Family Bishop always spoke of True Center as our goal, without anybody knowing why. It was handed down. We believe it. But this . . .” Toby saw that his father was nearly finished, his endurance broken by the enormity of this place.
Then the gray exhaustion hardened. Killeen’s face lost its slackness, eyes regaining their composure. “Toward the black hole? Look, we’ve followed what you said. And that Magnetic Mind, too. And we’ve come as far as we can. Whatever was supposed to be here, waiting for us, it’s gone. Eaten up. Burned away.”
Killeen said flatly, “I don’t believe it.”
Toby looked ahead of them. The ergosphere was a rotating fat waist in the diagram, but ahead bulged something spitting light like an angry, setting sun. Except that it extended away in a great, curving sheet. It arced into the distance, and Toby understood at last the size of the demon black hole that was the ultimate, hidden cause of all the cosmic violence he had witnessed. The vicious maw. The reason why the Galactic Center was a swarming, frying pit of death and loss.
Through eye-stinging radiance he saw the spreading sheen where the hole came finally to rule even the fabric of the universe, clasping space-time until it bent to the unending will of gravity.
Through ten billion years the galaxy had fed it. Stars had perished, swept into it by the millions. And the civilizations that had thrived around those suns—they had been forced to flee or die.
He wondered what planets that sun had once harbored, whether they had given birth to organic molecules that could link and replicate themselves, whether intelligence had once brimmed on those lost shores. Whether creatures had glimpsed their fate, seen it as a boiling, growing presence in the sky. Perhaps they had known that at the dead center of such immense tragedy sat an absolute, unblinking void.
“The ergosphere?” Toby whispered.
A strong timbre was back in Killeen’s voice. “Why?”
“Why?”
“To do what?”
“To where?”
“It’s a gamble. If we wait—”
Toby studied Killeen. The glare surrounding Argo cut deep shadows in the face he knew so well, and in a hardening of the broad mouth Toby saw what they would do.
Photovores
Burning flowers rise from the disk. They blossom, spewing plasma seeds above and below the slow, spiraling churn.
Bright tongues press out. Positron swarms. Prickly, annihilating all they touch.
They dissolve where they strike the incoming, leaden matter. Antimatter spills and licks and dies. A blaze of hard gamma, cleansing purity.
Their funeral pyre is an outward-ramming wall of pure photons. Intense, implacable. Pushing back matter that wants to fall into the grasp of the gravity well.
Electromagnetic stresses work along the surface of the expanding pressure-bubble. Green worms twisting. Dark oblongs of troubled mass slow, hesitate above the fray. The infall halts.
Yet this is the food of the Eater itself, the raw material of the disk and all the following fury. The disk begins to starve. Not immediately, for light takes hours to cross the hurricane forests of furious, grinding gravity.
Inertial moments tick on. The disk ebbs. In turn, its light pressure—now holding back a jostling layer of anxious, ionized mass—drains away.
As the press of photons subsides, matter resumes its fatal fall. Again streams of black mass spiral down. The disk accepts this tribute. Fire-flowers again shatter clumps, smash molecules to atoms, strip atoms into bare charge.
So goes the press and relax, press and relax. Perpetual armature.
Fountain. Life source.
Above the disk, safe from the sting, hang motes. Sheets, planes, herds. Uncountable. Billowing with the electromagnetic winds. Holding steady.
The photovores are grazing.
They coast on the fitful breeze of electrons and protons blown out by the Eater’s angry disk. Great wings of high-gloss moly-sheet spread, catching the particle wind’s steady push. Vectoring.
They apply magnetic torques in a complex dynamical sum. Turning, they wage a constant struggle to slip free of the Eater’s gravitational tug.
Yet they must use these ruling forces in their own perpetual, gliding dance. This is ordained.
At times the herds fail to negotiate the complex balance of outward winds against the inward, seductive drag. Whole sheets will peel away.
Some are cast into the shrouded masses of molecular clouds, which are themselves soon to boil away. Others follow a helpless descending gyre. Long before they would strike the brilliant disk, the hard glare hammers them. They burst into tiny pinpricks of dying light.
But not now. A greater governing force approaches.
Ink-dark lenses swivel to regard an intruder. Easing in from high along the Eater’s axis, sensors see only ceramic slabs and high-impact buffers. Intelligence sheathed against the torrent. Circuits an atom wide, filmy substrates, helium-cold junctions—all are vulnerable here to the sting of gamma rays and hard nuclei. Even the exalted wear armor.
But the photovores see only a presence they should honor. The vast sailing herds part. Ivory sheets curl back to reveal still deeper planes: yellow-gold light seekers.
These live to soak in photons and excrete microwave beams. With minds no more complex than the tube worms of ancient oceans, they are each a single electromagnetic gut, head to tail. Placid conduits.
Dimly they know that this descending presence is the cause of their being. Herds shear apart in reverence for its passage.
A trembling chorus of greeting. The coasting mass ignores them.
Their hissing microwaves waver. Momentary confusion. Then come fresh orders. They focus all their abundance upon the passing presence. The visitor needs more power here. They feed it.
Accelerating, it mashes a few of the herd on its carapace. It never notices the layers and multitudes peeling back, their gigahertz voices joined in glad chorus. They are plankton. It ingests their offering without heed.
In any case, a worsening discussion preoccupies it.
Our/Your deception went well. But I/We do not like their close approach to the Wedge.
The infalling star lashes the disk. They will probably perish there quite soon.
They may make use of turbulence.
I/You have been trying to understand their way of thinking. Let us discourse in their style of two-valuedness. It may serve to anticipate their moves.
Like this? I am merely me?
And I am a sole self as well. See how simple?
Stunted. Awkward.
Yet this is how they live.
As an experiment, I accept. The concept of “me” is so limiting. Nevertheless—Report!
Our direct intrusion into their craft went as planned. We interrogated their systems with the bolt of electrical discharges.
These craft-systems are loyal to us?
No. They cannot be, without destroying themselves.
We cannot master such minds?
They spring from an era when the primates knew how to protect against us.
Did they yield up the secrets we seek?
Not entirely. They know that this heritage the humans have is embedded in hard matter.
Improbable, on the face of it.
Though true, apparently.
Who would ever use such savage methods?
The primates were in decline when they devised this record, recall. Any electrical memory we would eventually subvert.
So it is in their ship?
Apparently, but not all of it. Encased in matter somehow. The Legacies, they term it. But the vessel of containment is not clear.
This clarifies matters. We must vaporize their craft.
Not all the needed information is there.
Where is the rest of it?
We do not know.
Is this why they speak to the magnetic Phylum?
To lodge their secrets there? That would make our task difficult.
You might be able to force compliance from that Phylum.
To do so entails moving enough mass to interrupt their field lines massively. The energetics are daunting.
Let you hope that is not called for.
Perhaps it is best to probe further, despite the dangerous warp of the quasi-mechanicals’ hoop-discontinuity.
With the same energies, directed into the heart of their craft, they would be vapor now.
Be mindful: The electrical discharges we devised infested their very innermost intelligences. Their own electrominds—of limited breadth, but useful—now listen for us.
Can they find these Legacies?
They already have some of them.
Excellent! What are they?
A guide to the location of their own genetic heritage.
A genome map?
Apparently.
That is of no danger to us.
Apparently.
You seem uncertain.
There are odd traces of data woven into the code. Useless, it would seem.
Errors, probably.
I wish we could be sure.
One must live with such ambiguities. It is of our and your nature to tolerate them.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
There are no clear signs that any primates have reached the Wedge in a long time.
Some surely have gotten through.
Many of us dislike talk of the Wedge.
Now who is uncomfortable with ambiguity?
The decision to assault the Wedge long ago came from all of us.
No—it was mostly yours.
That is oversimplified! I knew this division into two selves would vex me! See? It leads to blame—self-blame. Surely you must admit that the idea, to carve the Wedge to pieces with a hoop-discontinuity, was a good one.
Except that the Wedge swallowed the hoops.
We need not dwell on memories. The Wedge will yield to us in time.
Exactly, though not the way you mean. The Wedge is in time—which is why we cannot reach it.
Our science will master it eventually. We have surpassed all else that ventured here. What matters this, if they enter the Wedge?
We have deployed a relay point. It will perch at the lip of the Wedge, picking up signals from their craft, sending them to us.
That requires great energy of the relay ship. Only the Wedge can hang suspended against the slide of space.
True. But the effort will be repaid.
We tried such methods before—and lost much.
This time is vastly more important.
Concentrate on these primates! They are the past—shuck them from us.
There is something of the future in them.
Ignore such musings. You have a mission—do it.
We must learn the nature of the threat. Otherwise we cannot be sure we can in fact expunge it.
Of course we can.
Ignorance is not an effective strategy.
I do not like your tone, Aesthetic.
Then I am understood.
PART THREE
The Time Pit
ONE
Deep Reality
They plunged toward the boundary sheet of the ergosphere. Toby thought it looked like the flexing skin of some blistered animal, leathery and trembling with perpetual rage.
Then Argo shot along it, accelerating in the quickening gravity, and his perspective changed. Now it was like a troubled sea just below, tossed with wrinkles and waves. Big combers collided with each other in choppy sprays, whipped into a frenzy by an unseen storm.
“Hold on,” Killeen said
stiffly.
Toby was strapped into a Bridge couch. Gravity shifted all around them, plucking at his clothes, fidgeting in his inner ear, tilting his sensorium so that even his vision lurched and heaved. His crackling, faint Zeno Aspect volunteered,
These forces . . . vagrant . . . were recorded by . . . expeditions . . . humans . . . described them as “like an irritated tiger shaking a mouse.”
“Ummm . . . what’s a tiger?” Toby had seen field mice, had trapped the sharp-toothed rodents who ate their grain in Citadel Bishop. Zeno sent a foggy picture of something gazing with quiet, threatening ferocity. Flaring full-color into his sensorium, it sent a chill of alarm through Toby, until Zeno said,
This creature . . . data says . . . scarcely longer than your hand.
“What a relief.” He imagined being picked up and tossed around by a cat. The stomach-churning lurches and twists he could take, but sometimes the turbulence felt like whispery fingers trailing along his skin, eerie and ghostlike.
Bridge officers were in couches, but the Cap’n paced the deck grimly, fighting the tugs and yanks of vagrant gravity, unwilling to yield. No one dared interrupt Killeen’s thoughts as his boots thumped hard, hands clasped behind his back, face a permanent scowl.
Toby could see that his father was steeling himself against what looked like certain disaster. To charge into the unknown was one thing, a long habit for the Families. But to slam into the face of a living blackness . . .
Killeen nodded to Jocelyn. “Now.”
A sliding sensation. Toby gulped. A stretching wrench. The entire Bridge seemed to hold its breath.
They plunged toward the rippling skin of the ergosphere. The surface worked with gales black as carbon. Troughs and crests were lit by a hell-red glow, light bent and squeezed by brute gravity.
Jocelyn whispered, throat tight, “This is it!”
—and they dove beneath the waves.
In.
Through.
Toby blinked. No shock, no collision. Smooth, swift sailing into—
Flaming bullets. They rode through a rain of light.
Furious Gulf Page 16