'Mass-less?'
He nodded slowly.
I said 'But gravity is a function of mass.' He didn't feel the need to reply to this self-evident statement.
'I don't understand,' I said.
Agifo3acca was silent for a while before replying. 'Gravity is a folding of space-time associated specifically with matter, with mass,' he said. 'With the presence of mass, or the acceleration of mass. But this Trench, this phenomenon, is simply a rip in space-time, a mass-less warping, a kind of tear. It exists.'
'It is you, I think, who are being insane. How can it have "no mass"? I don't understand.'
'It has existed a long time,' Agif said. 'It is almost certainly an artefact, not natural.'
This stopped the conversation. It was the sort of thing a madman would say, an obsessive, an unbalanced and schizophrenic man. In the worlds of t'T there are sometimes such illnesses where the cultures do not permit dotTech in the brain. These people will rave of aliens and other civilisations. But, dear stone, there are no aliens. Humanity has crossed and recrossed the fast-space and the slow-space, visited every world and star, penetrated even into sublight realms, underworlds. But there has never been discovered a single material object that would suggest alien life, present or past. Not one fragment of xeno-bone, not a ghostly radio signal gibbering and crackling lost in space. There are primitive life forms on hundreds of worlds; insects and worms, plants and fish, but nothing that thinks, that imagines or dreams or makes art. Sensible people accepted long ago that humanity is the only sentient creature to have existed.
More: there are philosophical reasons for considering ourselves the only being in the universe. Philosophy discovered long ago, before even space flight had been developed, that the fact an intelligent consciousness observes the world around it alters the world observed; that perception has a direct effect on the subatomic world. This is what an antique human, one Heisenberg or Weisenberg (records are uncertain; I prefer the latter because it suggests a certain sense of humour[28]) discovered. It is possible, he said, for a human observer to detect which direction an atom is moving in; or to observe how fast it is going; but it is strictly and literally impossible for a human observer to know exactly which direction an atom is travelling and how fast it is going. Amazing! His contemporaries thought so, but the fact remains that by the process of observing at the atomic and subatomic level that-which-is-observed changes. It is the foundation stone of modern philosophy. Dear stone, I am not trying to patronise your ignorance, but allow me to rehearse this for you: at the subatomic level 'things' do not really exist the way that you or I exist – not as hard, concrete, certainties. Instead everything is a sort of probability haze, each particle occupying a number of possibilities. And this is the nature of that level until it is observed by an intelligence - then and only then do the probabilities collapse and become pinned down. Is this atom here or there? Well, it is in a real sense both here and there, and in neither position, all at once – until it is observed, and then it takes up a position in one or other or neither place.
It still puzzles the mind to consider it, when you really think about it. To be truthful, stone, I haven't really thought about it since my schooldays. Amazing!
Anyway, the point is this: the fact that consciousness affects the very fabric of the universe in this basic way argues that there can only be one consciousness in the universe. If there were aliens – if there were some other sentient, thinking-reasoning-problem-solving race of beings in our galaxy, then they would observe a different universe to the one we inhabit. This is not a mere figure of speech my precious stone, it is a literal truth stemming from the way the universe interacts between quantum and larger levels. If there are 'aliens' then they live in a different universe from us, one which we cannot inhabit (for even if we travelled there we would not perceive and therefore not call into being the same place).
Now, everybody knows this; every half-educated person, every child. This is why there are no alien artefacts, no others to come visiting, or to flee before us. We are alone. So now, in their place, humanity has used its own nanotechnological adeptness to transform itself. Why do we need aliens when we can grow our own eyes-on-stalks, our own scales and feathers, when our bodies can adopt any fantastical shape they choose? There are no aliens, so we mimic their imagined shapes in our own bodies.
Everybody knows this.
But this basic fact of the universe, something as inevitable and ubiquitous as light, or hydrogen, or gravity, does not stop some people from believing in aliens. Certain distracted or insane people (I use the terms clinically) used to believe that aliens lurked in the Trench – or that a vast alien civilisation had risen and fallen and left not a single trace of evidence. A population of so many trillions of people allows for a great diversity of opinion, and diversity is a good thing, so I did not really intend the tone of voice with which I addressed Agif:
'Are you, then, a crank?'
He rolled his eyeballs to show white, like clouds sliding up to cover the sun. He said nothing. I fretted that I had inadvertently expressed something more scathing than I had purposed.
'You suggest,' I explained, 'that an alien race grew to interstellar prominence, an empire – that they colonised many worlds and developed fantastic technologies – great enough to build this titanic artefact – technologies far in advance of ours because they could use their skill to kink space in a gravity configuration without the use of mass. You suggest that this great flowering of interstellar sentience grew, built this artefact, and then vanished so completely as to leave no tatter or shred of material evidence that they had ever existed?' It is possible that I was exercised, angry even, by the end of this speech: but it seemed so absurdly impossible it was actively provoking to me.
Agifo3acca slotted the pupils of his eyes back into their usual place and looked at me. 'No material evidence,' he said, 'except the Trench.'
'Except the Trench.'
'Ships have explored it,' Agifo3acca said, in a quiet voice. 'Flown close to it. Probes have scoured along the inner lip of it. The only mass within is the accumulation of dust and gas and stray matter that you would expect so powerful an attractor to gather after so many thousands of years – not nearly enough matter in itself to exert the gravitational pull that the Trench exerts. Space-time is ripped at the Trench, but not by matter.'
'But these aliens,' I pressed. 'Where did they go? Did they vanish into thin air – or thinner vacuum? Their bodies? Their cities? Their chips? Their vast technological engines, capable of engineering on so colossal a scale? Where are these things? More than this, where are their radio transmissions, their light spheres expanding outwards inevitably and forever? We would be able to detect these things, but – nothing, nothing. You say they vanished and took all these things with them?'
Agifo3acca looked at me, impassive.
'Where did they go?' I insisted.
'Since you ask,' he said in an unusually slow grumbling voice, 'I believe they transcended.'
This, then, was the view of Agifo3acca, an opinion he held to as tenaciously as he did to his religious beliefs in his fractionated God. We had many conversations about the Trench after this, and sometimes I was better able to contain my mockery and sometimes less.
'Think of space-time as an elastic sheet,' he told me as if I were a schoolchild again. 'Imagine three dimensions in two, as a great stretchable sheet.' I didn't have the heart to rebuke him for his condescension. 'A mass, for instance, a star, or perhaps a planet, is like a stone' – do you attend to what I say here, my dear stone of mine? – 'bowing the sheet down. Gravity is this dip, this conical drawing-down of the fabric of spacetime. A dot travelling close to this gravitational distortion in spacetime (a dot, a spacefarer, moving through vacuum in a straight line) will swerve around in an arc if it goes near enough to roll into the dip. Like a golf ball rounding its hole, its path may be deflected, or it may circle and circle (which we call orbit), or it may fall in altogether. You play golf?'
Unexpected, this. 'No,' I said. 'No.'
'No? It is not part of your culture, I suppose. So, this golfhole is an image of a conventional object. A sphere, a mass. But this is not the Trench. There is no mass bending spacetime in the Trench, no actual weight drawing down the elastic sheet. Instead the sheet has been, as it were, folded, creased in so firm a manner as to retain its kink - but creased is far too small a word to describe the undertaking. This thing has been creased in a thousand-light-year line, as if spacetime itself were nothing more than a piece of paper. You know what paper is?'
(Scoffingly, because I was increasingly annoyed at his superior manner, as if expecting me to be ignorant.) 'Of course! I have often written, created artistically, upon this papper.'
He angled his head at my mispronunciation, surprised that I would make the error as a native speaker (but it is hardly a common word).[29] 'To them,' he said, his eyes sparkling with wonder, 'the whole of space-time was nothing more than a sheet of paper. Imagine the power! They could fold space itself on a gigantic scale. We do not know how they were able to do this thing.'
I burst out at this. 'It cannot be,' I said, irritably. 'This makes no sense. Gravity is a fucntion of matter – all matter possesses it.' Which is of course true, dear stone. Even you! The gravity of greater rocks, rocks like planets, is much greater, but even you, even in your smallness, you possess a tiny gravity field.
Agifo3acca shook his head, displaying his teeth again in his disconcerting manner. 'Not so,' he said. 'Gravity is not possessed by matter.'
'Nonsense!' I said. 'Nonsense!'
'There are other gravitational effects,' he said. 'Acceleration for instance. Accelerate rapidly enough and you experience gravity. The Trench is evidently a third way of creating a gravitational effect. We simply don't understand how, as yet.'
I changed my angle. 'Humanity has known of this thing for thousands of years,' I said. 'It is perhaps the most prominent feature of space travel, something space-farers must detour around. It has surely been investigated and investigated! Surely generations of people have studied it and studied it!' I was, I concede, hazy with the details, but was nonetheless adamant. 'There can be no mystery.'
Agifo3acca nodded. 'It has been thoroughly explored,' he agreed. 'But there is little to explore. We cannot reach the "bottom" of the Trench, we can only observe it from a distance.'
'A black hole,' I said. 'A black wall . . .'
'In a manner of speaking, yes. But in other ways, no. For instance, if matter falls into a black hole it simply makes the hole bigger, increases the gravitational pull. When too much matter falls into the Trench – this black Trench – it interferes with the mechanism by which it is maintained. Somehow, I am not sure how. At its far ends, where the Trench has drifted into the Wallows at one end and the Bulk at the other, the dust and gas has simply dissipated it, it has ceased to exist.'
He stopped, seemed to contemplate for a while. Then he went on. 'Also, it was broken. It seems like that when it was . . . built, the Trench was a single straight object. It may have been the reason why this stretch of fast-space was cleared to begin with – we can only move at the speeds we do because we occupy fast-space, and I am certain that this patch of fast-space was opened in the galactic arm as a side-effect of the construction of the Trench. But that is hard to prove. What is certain is that over time, with the rotation of the Galaxy, the Trench has shifted in relation to everything else. And, of course, it is now in two sections, rather than one.'
'What broke it?' I asked, drawn in almost despite myself.
'Who can say? Perhaps something massive enough fell into it – a black hole, perhaps. Perhaps it malfunctioned in the middle portion. Who can say?'
'Malfunctioned,' I repeated. 'You make it sound like some kind of machine.'
His eyes twinkled at me. 'Perhaps it is,' he said. 'Who can tell?'
Then, one day, he took me out to have a look at it. We went down to one of the many hangars in his bizarrely castillion spaceship. We got aboard one of the transparent shuttles, which wormed forward and slid down the chute and out through the hangar's sphincter. It was a small car, and there was only just room for the two of us inside it. Agifo3acca sitting facing forward and me facing backwards. I saw the sphincter close behind us in a fireworks-burst of icicles and wisps of released gas.
'I have not seen this design of shuttle before,' I said, over my shoulder to Agifo3acca. 'It is entirely transparent. Even the working parts are entirely transparent.'
Agifo3acca said nothing, so I was compelled to repeat the statement entire, just to elicit a response. Then he said 'Yes.'
We flew, sublight but at very rapid speed, for thirty hours or so. Many months passed for the rest of the t'T. I slept through a lot of this. During the few occasions when I was awake, I would sometimes attempt to engage Agifo3acca in conversation. I asked a number of questions, trying (since directly asking about Wheah culture had met with silence) to approach the matter obliquely. I asked:
'Are you married, Agifo3acca? Do the Wheah believe in taking partners?' Nothing. 'I heard that they did. I read a poem onetime, a forty-thousand-page poem, largely about the taking and giving in marriage of the Wheah.' Nothing.
Later, I tried: 'Perhaps you have children?'
Then: 'Have you ever killed anybody? I understand that you have warriors amongst the Wheah?' This was obviously closer to the point, but Agifo3acca still said nothing.
'I find it strange,' I said. 'The other day you were so very garrulous on the subject of the Gravity Trench. Now you say nothing at all.'
'The Gravity Trench,' said Agifo3acca, in his grumbly voice, 'is my life now. The other things you ask after, they are no longer part of my life. I am no longer part of the Wheah.'
I kept my own counsel at this; but I didn't believe him. No longer part of the Wheah indeed! But he could not be drawn into further conversation, so I sat back and eventually I slept.
Agifo3acca woke me. 'Are we there?' I asked him.
'Close enough to make magnification a direct rather than a virtual business,' said Agifo3acca, which had been the point of the journey in the first place.
The transparent pod that enclosed both of us went milkily opaque, and then clear again; the smartglass was magnifying what lay around us. There was a bright spot with a fuzzy tail; a single star from which a tapering thread of hot gas was being sucked away by the Gravity Trench. The blob of light was beside Agifo3acca's head, and the trail of white stretched over towards me.
'That,' said Agifo3acca, with a tone that sounded to me (making allowances for the differences of culture) like an almost religious reverence; 'that is the star Bamk. It is a single rank-class star, medium-small, probably generated from the Wallows one or one and a half million years ago. Since then it has wandered, travelled far; and now it has intersected with the Trench, which has also travelled far. It is passing close enough to have its outer envelope of superheated gas sucked away.'
The Trench itself was invisible, except where the escaping gases from the star Bamk spread a little before vanishing. I wondered about the nomenclature: 'Bamk' did not sound like a Glice word. Had the Wheah star-charted the whole reach of t'T space? Did they have names for all our systems and stars, even ones as insignificant as this medium-small planetless body before us?
'The Trench,' I said, 'is more or less invisible to the human eye.'
'Yes,' said Agifo3acca, with the closest his lugubrious manner ever came to excitement. 'Allow me to . . .' The screen changed; a blue-purple swathe of colour popped into being across the cockpit transparency.
'This is one form of image enhancement,' he said. I noticed that the star Bamk had changed from white to a delicately pale blue, as ethereal as a winter's sky on Terne. 'It registers relative gravitational intensity. If you look closely, the point where the gas trail from Bamk intersects the Trench is black – that is effectively infinite gravitational attraction, such as is found in a black hole.'
'Shouldn't the wh
ole Trench be black then?'
'Not exactly. There should be – is, in fact – a thread of absolute gravitational intensity running down the exact middle of the phenomenon; but the lip of the event-horizon means that we can't see it from where we are. That is why this is my favourite vantage point, because the stream of matter flowing from Bamk pries the event-horizon back a little, as it were, like lips separating to allow in a stream of food.'
'Food?'
'A fanciful metaphor.'
'Will Bamk, then, be consumed?'
'Yes,' said Agifo3acca, as if I had asked a ridiculous question. 'Of course.'
'And this will affect the Trench – perhaps break it again?'
Agifo3acca snorted – the first time I had heard him make that sound. 'No. It would take more than the mass of a small star to break up the Trench. A million Bamks would not disrupt it.'
'And yet something broke it, in the middle,' I pointed out.
He ignored this, and instead took me through the various image enhancements that his shuttle was capable of. The Trench came up as red, as green, as a rainbow of contour-marking shades, as a system of lines, as a forest of dashes like iron filings in a magnetic field. I was soon bored, but Agifo3acca was so caught up with his life-defining task that he went on and on.
Eventually, however, he turned the shuttle back and started for home again. I slept once more, and woke to the blackness of space. You sleep so much, said my AI.
'Oh,' I said aloud; and then, conscious of the proximity of Agifo3acca, I subvocalised: I am surprised to hear from you.
Surprised?
It has been days. Days of silence. And now you speak.
I wanted to see the phenomenon.
The Trench? Why?
It is a fascinating thing.
You wanted to see the Trench? Why?
Only because.
And now that you have seen it?
There was silence for a bit, so I subvocalised: You are a strange creature. Why are you interested in something such as the Gravity Trench?
Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Page 23