The tree shook as the fields compensated. Weight fluctuated. Bram hoped nobody was moving about; otherwise, there might be broken bones that couldn’t be attended to for some hours. Starfog enveloped them, dimming the fire ahead but not hiding it. Violet stars bobbed by, bloating themselves on the feast of gas; their violet color was the computer program’s translation of the x-rays kindled by that rain of starmist.
Outside the clear elastic windows, the cloud manifested itself only as a dull red flicker—random flashes caused by encounters of gas molecules with relativistic electrons and orphaned protons that happened to be traveling in the same direction as Yggdrasil.
They broke through the cloud a minute later, into the awful radiance of the galaxy’s inner heart. The whirlpool was just ahead, a roaring cataract of flame.
“Here we go!” Jao’s voice said.
An enormous force seized the tree. Abruptly, weight was gone. Yggdrasil’s acceleration was insignificant within that tremendous grip; it was like rowing upstream against a waterfall.
“Stay down!” Bram shouted.
His voice cut through the sudden babble, and people who had started to move clung to their mats. Bram thumbed the intercom switch and repeated his warning for those in their quarters.
Tidal forces changed their orientation as Yggdrasil, now in orbit around the outside hole, swung loose on its tether. The probe, uselessly spitting hadronic photons, must similarly have been trying to align its axis with its strange new parent body.
Bram fervently and irrationally hoped the probe’s drive was pointed down, not up. Not that it would significantly matter in these few minutes and in view of the greater forces acting on the vehicle. In any case, he reminded himself, breaking free of orbit now would be every bit as deadly as diving into the black hole itself.
Equipment went sliding and crashing. People gasped as they felt the tidal pseudogravity change its direction. The hole didn’t care which axis it struck through the wider diameter of the dumbbell-shaped body it had captured, but Yggdrasil, bless it, did, and the tree’s struggle to “remember” its Bobbing Day vertical saved the humans from injury.
“Hold on to something if you can!” Bram shouted. “Try to stay in contact with the floor!”
Yggdrasil held together. Jun Davd had done his calculations well. The smaller black hole, with a solar-system-size circumference of over a billion and a half miles, was big enough, and their orbital distance from it great enough that tidal forces could not pull the tree apart. And the size of an individual human being was too insignificant to matter. Bram could feel the differential in the tug between his head and his feet, but it was no worse than the second-rate artificial gravity to be found in a spinning space vehicle that happened to have a diameter of only forty or fifty feet.
“Here comes the fun part,” Jao said over the loudspeaker.
Yggdrasil swooped around the focus of its orbit. It was now attaining the inside loop of its curve. It was no longer speeding around the black hole in a direction contrary to the hole’s own path around the parent hole, but was picking up fifty thousand g’s worth of acceleration from the hole’s orbital motion.
All for free, as Jao had pointed out. It was fifty thousand gravities that would have crushed them to paste if they had not been in free fall around the body that was providing it.
The only scary part of it was the fact that the inside loop was taking the treeful of humans between the two black holes.
“Oh, Bram,” Mim whispered, squeezing his hand in a death grip. “Can such things be?”
The screen was blinding, even though it showed a bowdlerized version of the radiance outside. They passed between cascades of fire that sheeted to infinity. The eye followed those ravening walls along a path of bent light that made nonsense of perspective—on and on past the point where they should have recurved and eclipsed themselves.
At the center of each infinity, the fires poured into an iris: nothingness surrounded by violet inferno.
“I wasn’t sure we’d be able to see the holes themselves,” Jun Davd’s awed voice said. “I thought the accretion disks and the surrounding infall would block them from sight. But geometry doesn’t mean anything here. We’re within a few billion miles of each of them—less than a light-day away. If you’re willing to accept an arbitrary definition of distance in the vicinity of gravitational fields like these, that is.”
Bram’s fear that there would be no path between the two accretion disks proved to be unfounded. What had appeared from a distance to be a merging of the twin vortices was a less substantial barrier up close. The accretion disks traded material, it was true, but the gaseous zone between them was tenuous enough to pass through. And Yggdrasil wasn’t going to be here long enough to worry about orbital decay. As they plunged between the fountaining sheets of flame, a curtain seemed to open up continually before them.
There was a moment when a giant eye looked in at them through the observation wall. People cried aloud in wonder. In the yawning eternity that the hole’s gravity had made of time, light was downshifted even more than Yggdrasil’s tremendous speeds had done thus far. Theoretically, there should have been nothing visible.
And nothing was what they were seeing.
Then the hole flung them away. The tree whipped around the loop, its path bent back on itself, and headed out of the galaxy. The transfer of orbital energy had been tremendous, and the hole’s precession had given the tree the additional vector that would angle its path above the ecliptic.
The weight of acceleration returned. People picked themselves up and started to move about. The g-forces were back to normal now. There was no need to force the pace. Whatever the danger from the front of radiation that would inevitably overtake them at some undetermined time in the years ahead, they had successfully navigated between those terrible whirlpools without being caught in the ultimate collapse.
Bram helped Mim to her feet. Together they went to the view wall. Other people were lined up along the safety rail, looking out.
There was something to see now, for the first time since the starbow had moved out of sight.
The universe was filled with light. Light of all colors, in wisps and ribbons and streamers.
An elongated blob of mottled blues and greens stretched, writhed, broke up into smaller blobs of violet and orange. A long pennant of pale blue flapped and disintegrated into a thousand filaments. Iridescent tendrils reached after the craft and fell behind. The striations of color played against a background of white radiance that cast long multiple shadows behind the people at the rail.
Yggdrasil was riding the shock waves out of the galactic center. In the nearby volume of space, collimated beams of accelerated matter were traveling in the same relativistic frame as Yggdrasil and shedding some of their radiation in the visible part of the spectrum.
The grateful tree dwellers drank in the spectacle, chattering happily after the tension of the past hours. Nobody was stopping to think about what it meant.
“It’s beautiful,” Mim said.
Bram said nothing. It was the beauty of death.
“It’s hard to believe two hundred thousand years have gone by since we left the galaxy,” Marg said. The tiny curved smile on her lips indicated an attempt at whimsy. “You don’t look a day older, Mim. In fact, quite the reverse.”
Mim, holding the new baby, beamed. “I’m going to name her Lydis,” she said. “It comes from the tonality that Beethoven chose for a quartet movement he intended as a song of thanksgiving.”
“Very appropriate,” Orris said, “seeing that she was born on Safepassage Day.”
“I was going to wait a few more years before getting pregnant,” Mim said. “But then I decided I was young enough.”
“You’re not going to get much younger,” Marg said. “None of us are.”
Marg’s own baby was two years old now. She and Orris had finally taken the plunge when Jun Davd had announced that they had officially left the exploding galaxy behind.
There had been a rash of births that year.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Jun Davd laughed, trying to extricate a gnarled finger from the baby’s grip. “Some of us elders still have quite a few years to go before we lose our wrinkles.”
Bram, hovering proudly over Mim and the baby and trying not to look too smug, said, “I don’t like to think of it as two hundred thousand years. Let the outside universe take care of itself. I prefer to count it in Safepassage Days—three more of them. We’re all still alive, and we’re even ahead of schedule.”
The first Safepassage Day had been celebrated the year after the black hole maneuver. Nobody had thought it up—it had just seemed to happen by itself. It came the day after Bobbing Day, and the two holidays had naturally merged into one extended festivity. A new set of rituals had quickly sprung up around Safepassage Day, with gift giving, overeating, and much hilarity. Bobbing Day was still observed, though the reason for it was now gone, with Yggdrasil under spin. It was mostly for the children, who celebrated with miniature trees, candy, and little gaily painted plumb bobs.
“Yes,” Trist said. “We picked up a tremendous boost not only from Jao’s gravity machine, but from all that dense stuff the ramscoop swallowed on the way out.” He grinned at Jao. “Jao, my hairy friend, what’s your refined estimate of our terminal velocity, and how long before we reach the galaxy of Original Man?”
Jao fidgeted on a seating puff next to the maternal nest. Mim had passed the baby to a cooing, clucking Ang, and he was afraid that he was going to be asked to hold it.
“Well,” he said, “there’s still a lot of plus and minus in the observations, but Jun Davd’s latest figures show us coasting at within a hundred millionth of one percent of the speed of light. That means we should cover thirty-seven million light-years in about five hundred and twenty-eight years, our time.”
There was a harrumph from the fringe of the little group, where Smeth had parked himself at a safe distance from the baby.
“Not precisely,” he said. “The ramscoop is still on standby. We’re bound to pick up a stray hydrogen cloud or two, even between galaxies. We still may shave a few years from that estimate.”
Smeth had finally been elected year-captain. He took it very seriously, even though there wouldn’t be much to do during the next five hundred years. He was driving everyone crazy, poking his nose into the cellulose plant, the glucose-processing operation, housing expansion, and the kitchens.
“How about it, Jao?” Bram asked.
Jao scowled. “I hope not,” he said. “We’ve got too much velocity to shed as it is. The Milky Way was supposed to be a pretty fair match for our galaxy in mass and configuration. Nobody figured on binary black holes and core explosions.”
“How are you going to brake?”
Jao shrugged. “We’ll spiral in, spiral out. We’ve got thirty-seven million years to figure out an approach. By that time the Milky Way’s own hypermass may have grown some.”
There was an uneasy shifting in the circle of people around Mim’s nest. Jun Davd said quickly, “A larger black hole at the center of a galaxy should in itself present no dangers. In any case, with a normal accretion rate, no black hole could swallow its galaxy within the probable lifetime of the universe.”
“Hey, hear that, little Lydis?” Trist said with theatrical heartiness. “Your new home is going to be around for what passes for forever!”
People made themselves laugh, but a small pall had invaded the maternity chamber. Bram knew that everyone was thinking about the Nar and their vanished civilization.
His eyes strayed to the window wall. There was nothing to see out there anymore except Yggdrasil itself—mile after mile of great twisting subbranches and carpets of leaves, lit up by the banks of spotlights that were trained on them from the shaft of the probe: not only to give Yggdrasil a sense of its own rotation, but to provide the human passengers with a sense of place in a universe that otherwise had gone blank.
Somewhere beyond Yggdrasil’s horizons was an exploding galaxy, its light blotted out by red shift. It didn’t bear thinking about. But it was impossible to shut it out of the mind.
Nen cleared her throat. “What heights must they have reached in the fifty thousand years they had left to them?” she asked. “They spread so fast through their arm of the galaxy in that little time. Expanding their domain. As if they knew they were racing against the end of everything.”
On the way out of the galaxy, Trist had used the antenna array to monitor the radio emissions of the spreading Nar civilization until they stopped—replaced by the random radio noise of frying suns. Bram had watched Trist change, become progressively haunted during those last years, and he knew that Trist must have brought some of his despair home to Nen in their quarters at the end of each day.
“In another million years they might have started up Skybridge, toward the Bonfire,” Trist said softly.
“That wonderful web of life—it’s all gone now!” Jao’s granddaughter said with unexpected fervor. “The Nar, the humans and other organisms they brought into being, the forests of space poplars multiplying through the cometary halos from star to star!”
Bram wished the conversation hadn’t taken this turn. All this was upsetting Mim on what should have been a happy day for her.
But it was Mim herself who wouldn’t let it go. “Trist,” she said. “Do you think they ever received our warning?”
“We can’t ever know,” he said. “It couldn’t have made any difference anyway.”
Mim had retrieved the baby from Ang. Bram thought that it made a pretty picture—Mim’s dark hair spilled down around her shoulders, the baby nuzzling at her breast. Life, he thought. Life out of the ashes of universal death.
“They gave life to humankind twice, you know,” Mim said almost in a whisper. “And there’s no way we can pay the debt.”
A slow dawning overtook Bram. He smiled at Mim. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, there is.”
Halfway across the night, Yggdrasil encountered a star. It was a fading red dwarf, so dim that they were almost upon it before the sensors reacted. In minutes of treeboard time, it was light-years behind them—too quick to call the passengers for a real-time look—but Jun Davd made a record for later replay by anyone who was interested.
“It must have broken free from its parent galaxy a very long time ago,” Bram said to Mim as they watched the replay in their quarters. “Any star much higher on the main sequence would have burnt out long ago.”
“Oh, Bram,” Mim said, moved by the sight. “Could a star like that have planets? With living creatures on them?”
He touched her arm. “If so, they live in a very lonely universe. Under a sky with nothing in it except a fuzzy patch or two.”
“Like us,” Mim whispered.
“No,” Bram said, “not like us. Someday we’ll have stars in our sky again.”
CHAPTER 4
“It’ll take us about forty more years to stop,” Jao said. “But we should end up in the approximate volume of space that Original Man used to inhabit.”
People were starting to bunch around the optical boundary of the gigantic holo projection that dominated what, by convention, was the forward end of the observation lounge. More spectators were trickling into the fan-shaped chamber. Yggdrasil had just burst out of one of the globular star clusters above the plane of the Milky Way, and word was going around that there was a magnificent view to be seen.
Bram stood a little aside with the rest of the astronomy and physics group, so as not to block the view. He’d been here about a half hour now, but he still couldn’t take his eyes off the image.
The central bulge of the galaxy loomed head on out of darkness: a spectacular incandescent yolk with the flattened disk spread out around it. The fires of the nucleus glowed yellow, those of the disk shading to the paler blues of older stars. Nearer, a hail of intervening stars streamed by, Yggdrasil’s tremendous speed putting them in visible motion.
The holo vista w
as startlingly realistic—much more so than the kind of flat computer display Jun Davd had made do with at the beginning of the voyage. But that was hardly surprising. He’d had centuries to improve on it and five generations of brilliant engineers to assist him.
This blazing vision was everything Bram had dreamed of all his life. A knot of indescribable longing formed in his chest. It was easy to forget that this was illusion—that in deceleration mode, with the tethered tree straining forward and a torrent of hadronic photons aimed along the probe’s axis through the focus of the sheltering ramscoop fields, the scene rushing toward him was actually beneath his feet.
Jao was taking some good-natured heckling from the crowd of onlookers. “Forty years is a long time to wait,” someone said.
“We could do it faster,” Jao said. “The limiting factor is the number, of g’s we want to take over an extended period of time.”
“I don’t understand how we’ll be able to brake at all,” somebody else said, “when we’re not approaching edge-on through the spiral arms.”
“We’ve already shed some velocity diving through the globular clusters,” Jao said. “And there’s plenty of mass in the central bulge, even though it’s not as concentrated as the one that sent us on our way.” His hands sketched the glowing egg in the holo behind him. “We dive straight down through the nice, nourishing H-II regions we’re going to find in there, we make a tight demiorbit around the central three parsecs, a safe distance outside the core that contains the black hole, the central star cluster, and the rotating inner ring of ionized gas. The normal orbit at that radius—if we wanted to stay there—takes ten thousand years, so we apply vector to turn it into a powered orbit. Nevertheless, we start to spiral out in spite of ourselves, in flatter and flatter spirals that bring us into the plane of the galaxy. And the spirals are retrograde, of course, so we’re using the magnetic brake of the nucleus itself. Nothing to it! It’s as easy as tomato pie! Isn’t that so, Bram?”
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