Ancestral Night

by Elizabeth Bear

  CHAPTER 13

  IT WAS A LONG TRIP. Connla learned some strategy game from Xxyxxyx and tried to get Singer interested in it. Singer continued with the hobby that had gotten him into draft trouble in the first place, which was playing in the official Synarche governance and conflict-resolution algorithm games and simulators. The so-called Global Dynamic Systems let him have a direct influence on government and policy through soft governance; there was oversight from the Core AIs and systers, but somebody a long time ago had figured out that people of almost all species tended to be more altruistic when allowed to set their own limits for sacrifice, and they’d also figured out that, statistically speaking, widesourced solutions to problems often worked out pretty well when you considered the average across responses, instead of the most popular response.

  I repeat this because Singer mentioned it to me no less than five or six times, along with some long-winded stuff about “using the narrative to change framing around complex problems whose solutions are impeded by poor conceptualizing.”

  He always wanted to talk to me about his hobbies when I was just getting into a good bit of my book. I am not sure how he could tell.

  Maybe we should send him off to govern for a few ans. Running checks and oversight on people and doing what he loved to do all the time might just get him to shut up about it occasionally when he came back.

  If he came back.

  Which was, of course, the outcome I feared.

  Life is change, I reminded myself, and scrolled open my copy of The Color Purple.

  I finished any number of very long antique books over the time that followed. Most recently, Roots, and by the time we were approaching the Core I had started Two Winding Stairs. Travel got fussier as we made our way into the Core. Space here was cluttered, hops short, and traffic in lanes controlled by AIs in order to avoid inadvertent and tragic colocations. Because we were not following a filed and programmed plan, we had to avoid the lanes.

  I think I read everything we had downloaded on that trip. I’d worked my way into the nonfiction, and some of Connla’s strategy books. I even picked up the little onionskin edition of Illuminatus! a couple of times and ran my thumb down the pages. They crinkled playfully. I put it back in my cubby, next to a chain a crèchemate gave me when I was little and a gingko leaf preserved in some kind of molded crystal. It was a keepsake of Terra, supposedly. I had read that in the early ans of the diaspora, people leaving the homeworld took a teaspoon of earth with them, but the practice fell out of favor eventually. Microbes, probably. And there were enough humans scattered through the galaxy by now that we would have excavated down to regolith if we’d kept up with it.

  White space, this far into the Core, was quite literally white. Less brilliant bands brindled it, but it was sufficiently bright outside that Singer dimmed all the viewports and even filtered the output from his own senso feed so that what reached Connla and me was considerably attenuated. We’d learned that trick some ans ago, around the time that we also discovered it was totally possible to develop a glare headache from referred senso.

  This has nothing to do, of course, with either Connla or me having a tendency to shrug into Singer’s skin and pretend to be a space ship ourselves. Definitely not while making vroom noises.

  We dropped out of white space occasionally in order to correct course or navigate around some large obstacle such as a star—which we had to do more and more, because while I could guide us by reading the curves of space-time, it turned out that the longer I did that the more exhausted I got, and the more likely I was to make mistakes. So it was easier to have me give Singer a map, and let him handle the tricky bits in normal space.

  Mistakes are a good thing to avoid, in space. And the EM drive doesn’t use fuel.

  Coming back Newton, we entered a jeweled realm. Stars—suns—gleamed huge and bright and close on every side. The depth of field was most striking; through the lack of perspective, space can seem flat. Here in the Core, though, the sheer density of pinprick stars gave a sense of texture to the velvety blackness they illuminated. You could read by their glow. You could probably even have drawn by it.

  By then, the Well was a constant presence—or a heavy absence, rather—in the back of my mind. It was not painful, but inescapable, inspiring me with trite comparisons to lost teeth and missing limbs. I felt it—not so much physically as through the Koregoi senso, which I guess means I felt it physically and I was making valueless distinctions to make myself feel better—as a pull whose effect swept an entire galaxy into a stately, turning spiral, the way you would feel it if you anchored your feet to the hull close to the hub of a station, in such a way that your body was parallel to the axis of rotation. Like when you’re young, and you hold two of another person’s hands and whirl around a common center of gravity until your other two limbs are flung out and the pair of you spin like a carousel.

  I found myself glancing constantly at the forward viewport, as if I might catch a glimpse of the Well we were rushing toward. It hung there, our destination, as present as the sense that somebody nearby is staring at you.

  More than a hundred diar later—which is to say almost that many white transitions and intermediary short coasts on EM drive later—I looked up not out of impatience, but because Singer’s senso warned me that now would be an excellent time to look up.

  I watched the wall of starlight peel itself back and shiver into countless discrete points of light just as we were falling out of white space and into reality, and I caught my first glimpse of the Well.

  How do you describe a system that might just be the biggest thing in the galaxy? It was there, right before us. Still distant enough so what we were seeing was a look down the slide of history into long ago.

  Revealed before us was a ballet of stars swathed in nebulae like layers of tulle and chiffon illuminated from within. Without really realizing I was expecting anything, I had nevertheless expected space around the Well to be empty and dark, a vacuumed carpet. Instead, the sky was full of brilliant clouds and orbiting stars.

  The cluster and its primary massed something like four million times what a yellow dwarf star does. You could make an argument that the object at its heart was, in fact, the primary for the entire Milky Way galaxy, the Well so deep it swept all the systems and systers of the vast and far-flung Synarche in our endless, careening dance.

  At its center, veiled in all those whirling nets of mist and light, lay the most incredible precipice in the galaxy. The event horizon of the supermassive black hole.

  The accretion disk around the Well was a vast, whipping spiral of white and peach and gold, redshifting through orange into blood as it approached the center. Around the edge of the event horizon was a lensed ring of light—the image of everything behind the Well condensed and twisted into a torus by the profound space-time curvature invoked by its mass.

  That was how, despite being a singularity from which no light escaped, the Saga-star was mistily visible, its deformed crescent of brilliant light a partial ring around a hopelessly dark center. It looked like images I’ve seen of how a partially eclipsed sun would look on a cloudy dia, if you were on the dirt downwell.

  The Saga-star was so enormous, so vast, that even a human with no more protection than a space suit could have approached that event horizon, sidled right up to it, without being ripped apart by the tidal forces. You’d be blinded by its light—which Singer was filtering for us—and die in a blaze of blueshifted radiation condensed out of the entire history of the universe before you could get close enough to die of being stretched to pieces.

  The Saga-star whipped around at a tremendous rate of speed, much faster than the rotation of the accretion disk. That disk, and the relativistic jets careening forth at right angles from it, were not stable, stately spinning or fluttering objects such as you see in animations. Instead they roiled and twisted and barrel-rolled, as if the black hole were a giant marble wrapped in glowing fabric, spun at random.

  It looked
deadly and fierce, and the most amazing thing was that I wasn’t scared of it at all.

  It was too big, too powerful, too amazingly beyond my comprehension. Its companion stars swung around it. A couple of them had worlds, two of those even inhabited. There were systers that had grown up here as species.

  What would it do to your psyche if this were your sky? What would it do to the racial awareness of your species if this were their memory of their dirt-bound cradle, before they stepped out into the great emptiness beyond?

  Except they’d never have a concept of emptiness, or maybe even darkness, because their sky was a brilliant dance. As I watched, a star slid behind the Well and was lensed around it, appearing as a bent-seeming, melted-looking ring surrounding the brighter crescent of the accretion disk.

  It was—in the dictionary definition of the word—unfathomable.

  Because Singer was filtering the image and tuning our senso, I could also make out what he saw in so much more defined detail than I could have with my naked human eye, including the towering fountains of X-rays spewing perpendicularly to the accretion disk from the poles of the rapidly spinning black hole.

  The crescent shape of that visible accretion disk was not just an effect of gravitational lensing. It was also due to the fact that what we were seeing was not the light of the black hole itself, which of course did not emit any, which would be why it—and its lesser kin—were called black holes, after all. What we were seeing was radiation that had escaped the accretion disk, and the reason one side seemed so much brighter than the other was because that side of the accretion disk was rotating toward us at nearly the speed of light, so the escaping light—and other radiation—was being fired toward our observer position, while the other side was receding.

  The black hole was an eerie sight, a mystical experience. Probably because I was importing an enormous weight of expectation to this glimpse of the powers of gravity. But also because here it was, the avatar of destruction, but also the engine that drove the great wheel upon which all life as we knew it depended.

  I yawned like a nervous dog, feeling my jaw crack, and realized that I had risen from my work station and drifted—heedlessly—to the viewport, where I hung with my fingers pressed against the smooth, cool, transparent surface like a kid in front of an aquarium full of moray eels.

  “Wow,” said Connla, who had somehow appeared beside me. Perhaps Singer had summoned him.

  “Kinda makes you want to spit,” I joked.

  He punched me lightly on the arm. “You’re the one with the weird psychic Koregoi hunch about supermassive black holes. So what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, still staring. “Go closer?”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  We went closer, and I nursed a small, embarrassed secret. Because I had said I didn’t know—but I did know. Or the Koregoi senso knew, because I felt an instinctual urge to sidle up to the magnificent, incomprehensible emptiness marking out its stately dance of annihilation ahead of us. I was drawn into the furnace irresistibly, wondering all the while if this were in fact such a good idea after all.

  I felt like I had to do it. And I also felt like I couldn’t explain to Connla, or even Singer, why I seemed to know what I needed to do.

  It was probably a terrible mistake anyway. I told myself that I’d make sure we didn’t get too close. I told myself that moreover, Singer would make sure we didn’t get too close.

  I told myself that I didn’t really need to explain to my shipmates that the alien parasite shimmering over my body—seeming brighter now, as we grew closer to the Well—was feeding me strategy.

  Okay, so I was probably kidding myself.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  We proceeded in short white transitions and long coasts between, curving down the gravitic slope of the Well like a marble dropped into a shallow funnel. The accretion disk grew brighter and brighter; Singer extruded and installed more shielding to protect us from the saturating miasma of radiation. Being X-ray-cooked wasn’t really in our plans, either for Connla and me or for the kitten sisters.

  It also gave me an excuse not to exercise under gs, because Singer disassembled the spinlounge for materials. We’d just have to make do for a while.

  Fortunately, having two sets of hands helps with freefall stretching and isometrics.

  Space nearby was full of people—or as full as space gets, even in the tight confines of the Core. The skies around the Well were dotted with research and sightseeing vessels, not to mention all the craft merely on their way from one place to another, and skimming around the giant obstacle in the way. We dropped our encoded packets every time we came within range of a beacon, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before the Judiciary ships started coming out to meet us.

  I kept feeling around for the pirate ship and Farweather, but I could no longer detect them. I hoped it meant they were far away, but it was equally likely, I knew, that Farweather and her people had some means of cloaking themselves. I hoped it was just the black hole’s mass confusing my ability to detect them, because that meant that they, too, would probably be unable to find where I was.

  My ability to worry about pirates was sharply curtailed as we got closer and closer to the massive structure of the Well. It was a presence, but more than that, it was a font of data, and—since pirates don’t generally come near the Core, which is full of Synarche Judiciary—I was the first person with the ability to directly sense gravitational forces to approach it, as far as I knew.

  The first person since the Koregoi, at least.

  I was amazed, and I was boggled.

  The physics were too much for me, so I patched Singer in to my senso. He could handle the math, and anyway he pouted if I could sense things that he couldn’t. The exchange was supposed to go the other way, after all; he’d always had the superior machine sensorium, mine being limited by being, despite my improvements, a planet-evolved kludge of an organic, while he was built, after having been designed.

  It made him feel better, anyway, when I showed him what he was missing.

  We both started to pick up on the anomalies simultaneously. There were variations in texture, for lack of a better word, in the area surrounding the Well. And they seemed to have a semiregular pattern.

  This is not to say the Well’s accretion disk was, or should have been, entirely uniform. But the object itself was unbalanced, in its enormous mass, which should have been impossible. You can’t unbalance a singularity: it has no dimension, and dimension is a requirement when you’re trying to say that one end of a thing is heavier than the other.

  At last we coasted just—in relative terms at least—above the Well, as close as the sightseeing cruises ever came. Singer got pretty quiet, which I took to mean he was recruiting as many cycles as possible to crunch numbers. I floated and watched the gorgeousness that was the Well, in all its complexity and angular momentum.

  A huge, lonely melancholy welled up inside me at the sheer enormousness of what I was contemplating. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, exactly, so I let it ride.

  Perhaps what I was feeling was the thing called awe.

  Connla floated over next me, and we were companionably quiet for a while. The scale of the thing was so immense that though I knew the space around us bristled with other ships—syster and human—none were easily visible. I caught a flicker of a gleam of silver once or twice, starlight reflecting off the banking flank of another vessel. But that was all.

  Despite the distance, it made me feel a little less lonely.

  Connla said, “Do you know where the pirates are now?”

  I reached out, and still couldn’t find them. Farweather was obviously better at all this stuff than I was.

  “I can’t find her,” I said. “But there is something else going on.”

  “Interesting,” said Singer, who must have been giving me a fraction of his attention after all. “Focus on that structure, please.”

  “What structure?”

  He directed my
attention. “There’s a series of repeated gravitational anomalies here. That’s not something I’d expect to see inside a black hole. The literature doesn’t contain any description of something like this.”

  He caught himself, his next comment sounding amused. “In fairness, nobody has examined the space around a black hole with Koregoi technology in living memory—or if they have, they haven’t published on it.”

  What he was pointing at wasn’t within the Saga-star itself, where I shouldn’t have been able to recover any information, but rather in the relativistic jets that sputtered away from it, and also in the . . . well, the very fabric of space-time, warped and twisted as it was by the distorting mass of the Saga-star. The Well was a weird place, for sure.

  I was distracted briefly by sparking, twisting brightness like a thrashing snake of fire as one of the black hole’s satellite stars seemed to be shredding itself to pieces, stretching into an arc like an octopus arm above and east of the heart of the Well. It writhed brightly, a spectrum of raveling colors, and then vanished and jumped position as the star itself resolved into view, some distance away.

  The star had suffered no harm; the image of it had been distorted by intense gravitational lensing. Two more repeated images followed, as if the star navigated through a chamber of mirrors, reflected and its reflections reflected.

  Beyond it, I could sense an artificial construct, an enormous habitat that I deduced was Synarche Station itself, seat of government and hub of our confederation of species. It was more populous than most worlds, and for a moment I felt choked up as I considered it.

  But I focused my attention on what Singer wanted me to see, and I could make it out. There was a complicated series of concentric lines that looked like ripples, or a standing wave.

  If you could squint with the inside of your head, I squinted. “There’s a pattern.”

  “It’s a frequency spectrum generated with a diffraction spectrograph,” Singer said confidently. “And it’s detailed enough that I can determine what light source it’s modeling, I’m certain, given enough cycles.”