Otherness

by David Brin

  "Most massive noughts don't have stars as close neighbors, nor gas clouds to feed them so prodigiously and make them shine." Closing one eye again, Mikaela sent another command. In a flickered instant, the ostentatious display of stellar devouring was replaced by serene quiet. Cool, untroubled constellations spanned the theatre. Tenembro Nought was a mere ripple in one quadrant of the starry field, unnoticed by the audience until Mikaela's pointer drew attention to its outlines. A lenslike blur of distortion, nothing more.

  "Solitary macrosingularities like Tenembro are far more common than their gaudy cousins. Standing alone in space, hungry, but too isolated to draw in more than a rare atom or meteoroid, they are also harder to find. Tenembro Nought was discovered only after detecting the way it bent light from faraway galaxies.

  "The black hole turned out to be perfect for our needs, and only fifty-nine years, shiptime, from the colony on Kalimarn."

  Under Mikaela's mute guidance, the image enlarged. She gestured towards a corner of the tank, where a long, slender vessel could be seen, decelerating into orbit around the cold dimple in space. From the ship's tail emerged much smaller ripples, which also had the property of causing starlight to waver briefly. The distortion looked similar—though on a microscopic scale—to that caused by the giant nought itself. This was no coincidence.

  "Once in orbit, we began constructing research probes. We converted our ship's drive to make tailored microsingularities. . . ."

  At that moment a tickling sensation along her left eyebrow told Isola that a datafeed was queued with results from her latest experiment. She closed that eye with a trained squeeze denoting ACCEPT. Implants along the inner lid came alight, conveying images in crisp focus to her retina. Unlike the digested pap in Mikaela's presentation, what Isola saw was in real time . . . or as "real" as time got, this near a macro-black hole.

  More rippling images of constellations. She subvocally commanded a shift to graphic mode; field diagrams snapped over the starry scene, showing Tenembro's mammoth, steepening funnel in space-time. An uneven formation of objects—miniscule in comparison—skimmed towards glancing rendezvous with the great nought's eerily bright-black horizon. Glowing traceries depicted one of the little objects as another space-funnel. Vastly smaller, titanically narrower, it too possessed a centre that was severed from this reality as if amputated by the scalpel of God.

  ". . . with the objective of creating ideal conditions for our instruments to peer down . . ."

  Columns of data climbed across the scene under Isola's eyelid. She could already tell that this experiment wasn't going any better than the others. Despite all their careful calculations, the camera probes still weren't managing to straddle between the giant and dwarf singularities at the right moment, just when the black discs touched. Still, she watched that instant of grazing passage, hoping to learn something—

  The scene suddenly shivered as Isola's belly gave a churning lurch, provoking waves of nausea. She blinked involuntarily and the image vanished.

  The fit passed, leaving her short of breath, with a prickle of perspiration on her face and neck. Plucking a kerchief from her sleeve, Isola dabbed her brow. She lacked the will to order the depiction back. Time enough to go over the results later, with full-spectrum facilities.

  This is getting ridiculous, Isola brooded. She had never imagined, w hen the requisition request came, that a simple clonal pregnancy would entail so many inconveniences!

  ". . . taking advantage of a loophole in the rules of our cosmos, which allow for a slightly offset boundary when the original collapstar possessed either spin or charge. This offset from perfection is one of the features we hope to exploit. . . ."

  Isola felt a sensation of being watched. She shifted slightly. From her nearby pseudo-life chaise, Jarlquin was looking at Isola again, with a measuring expression.

  She might have the courtesy to feign attention to Mikaela's presentation, Isola thought, resentfully. Jarlquin seems more preoccupied with my condition than I am.

  The Pleasencer's interest was understandable, after having come so far just for the present contents of Isola's womb. My anger with Jarlquin has an obvious source. Its origin is the same as my own.

  An obsession with beginnings had brought Isola to this place on the edge of infinity.

  How did the universe begin?

  Where did it come from?

  Where do I come from?

  It was ironic that her search would take her to where creation ended. For while the expanding cosmos has no "outer edge" as such, it does encounter a sharp boundary at the rim of a black hole.

  Isola remembered her childhood, back on Kalimarn, playing in the yard with toys that made picosingularities on demand, from which she gained her first experience examining the warped mysteries of succinct event horizons. She recalled the day these had ceased to be mere dalliances, or school exercises in propulsion engineering, when they instead became foci for exaltation and wonder.

  The same equations that describe an expanding universe also tell of a gravity trough's collapse. Explosion, implosion . . . the only difference lay in reversing time's arrow. We are, in effect, living inside a gigantic black hole!

  Her young mind marveled at the implications.

  Everything within is aleph. Aleph is cut off from contact with that which is not aleph. Or that which came before aleph. Cause and effect, forever separated.

  As I am separated from what brought me into being.

  As I must separate from what I bring into being . .

  The fetus kicked again, setting off twinges, unleashing a flood of symbiotic bonding hormones. One side effect came as a sudden wave of unasked-for sentimentality. Tears filled Isola's eyes, and she could not have made image-picts even if she tried.

  Jarlquin had offered drugs to subdue these effects—to make the process "easier." Isola did not want it eased. This could be her sole act of biological creation, given the career she had chosen. The word "motherhood" might be archaic nowadays, but it still had connotations. She wanted to experience them.

  It was simple enough in conception.

  Back in the eighteenth century, a physicist, John Mitchell, showed that any large enough lump of matter might have an escape velocity greater than the speed of light. Even luminous waves should not be able to escape. When John Wheeler, two hundred years later, performed the same conjuring trick with mass density, the name "black hole" was coined.

  Those were just theoretical exercises. What actually happens to a photon that tries to climb out of a singularity? Does it behave like a rocket, slowing down under gravity's insistent drag? Coming to a halt, then turning to plummet down again?

  Not so. Photons move at a constant rate, one single speed, no matter what reference frame you use. Unless physically blocked or diverted, light slows for no one.

  But tightly coiled gravity does strange things. It changes time. Gravitation can make light pay a toll for escaping. Photons lose energy not by slowing down, but by stretching redder, ever redder as they rise from a space-time well, elongating to microwave lengths, then radio, and onward. Theoretically, on climbing to the event horizon of a black hole, any light wave has reddened down to nothing.

  Nothing emerges. Nothing—traveling at the speed of light. In a prim, legalistic sense, that nothing is still light.

  Isola spread her traps, planning tight, intersecting orbits. She lay a web designed to ambush nothing . . . to peer down into nowhere.

  "You know, I never gave it much thought before. The whole thing seemed such a bother. Anyway, I always figured there'd be plenty of time later, after we finished our project."

  Mikaela's non sequitur came by complete surprise. Isola looked up from the chart she had been studying. Across the breakfast table, her colleague wore an expression that seemed outwardly casual, but studied. Thin as frost.

  "Plenty of time for what?" Isola asked.

  Mikaela lifted a cup of port'tha to her lips. "You know . . . procreation."

  "Oh." Isol
a did not know what to say. Ever since the visitor ship announced itself, her partner had expressed nothing but irritation over havoc to their research schedules. Of late her complaints had been replaced with pensive moodiness. So this is what she's been brooding about, Isola realized. To give herself a moment, she held out her own cup for the pseudo-life servitor to refill. Her condition forbade drinking port'tha, so she made do with tea.

  "And what have you concluded?" she asked, evenly.

  "That I'd be foolish to waste this opportunity."

  "Opportunity?"

  Mikaela shrugged. "Look, Jarlquin came all this way hoping to requisition your clone. You could have turned her down—"

  "Mikaela, we've gone over this so many times . . ." But Isola's partner cut her off, raising one hand placatingly.

  "That's all right. I now see you were right to agree. It's a great honor. Records of your clone-line are on file throughout the sector."

  Isola sighed. "My ancestresses were explorers and star messengers. So, many worlds in the region would have—"

  "Exactly. It's all a matter of available information! Pleasence World had data on you, but not on a seminatural variant like me, born on Kalimarn of Kalimarnese stock. For all we know, I might have what Jarlquin's looking for, too."

  Isola nodded earnestly. "I'm sure of that. Do you mean you're thinking—"

  "—of getting tested?" Mikaela watched Isola over the rim of her cup. "Do you think I should?"

  Despite her continuing reservations over having been requisitioned in the first place, Isola felt a surge of enthusiasm. The notion of sharing this experience—this unexpected experiment in motherhood—with her only friend gave her strange pleasure. "Oh, yes! They'll jump at the chance. Of course . . ." She paused.

  "What?" Mikaela asked, tension visible in her shoulders.

  Isola had a sudden image of the two of them, waddling about the station, relying utterly on drones and pseudo-life servitors to run errands and experiments. The inconvenience alone would be frightful. Yet, it would only add up to a year or so, altogether. She smiled ironically. "It means our guests would stay longer. And you'd have to put up with Jarlquin—"

  Mikaela laughed. A hearty laugh of release. "Yeah, dammit. That is a drawback!"

  Relieved at the lifting of her partner's spirit, Isola grinned too. They were in concord again. She had missed the old easiness between them, which had been under strain since that first surprise message disrupted their hermit's regime. This will put everything right, she hoped. We'll have years to talk about a strange, shared experience after it's all over.

  The best solutions are almost always the simplest.

  Within a sac of amniotic fluid, a play is acted out according to a script. The script calls for proteins, so amino acids are lined up by ribosomes to play their roles. Enzymes appear at the proper moment. Cells divide and jostle for position. The code demands they specialize, so they do. Subtle forces of attraction and repulsion shift them into place, one by one.

  It is a script that has been played before.

  A script designed to play again.

  The pair of nanonoughts—each weighing just a million tons—hovered within a neutral gravity tank. Between the microscopic wells of darkness, a small recording device peered into one of the tiny singularities. Across the room, screens showed only the color black.

  Special fields kept each nought from self-destructing—either through quantum evaporation or by folding space around itself like a blanket and disappearing. Other beams of force strained to hold the two black holes apart, preventing gravity from slamming them together uncontrollably.

  It was an unstable situation. But Isola was well practiced. Seated on a soft chaise to support her overstrained back, she used subtle machines to manipulate the two funnels of sunken metric towards each other. The outermost rims of their space-time wells merged. Two microscopic black spheres—the event horizons themselves—lay centimeters apart, ratcheting closer by the second, as Isola let them slowly draw together.

  Tides tugged at the camera, suspended between, and at the fiber-thin cable leading from the camera to her recorders. Peering into one of those pits of blackness, the minitelescope saw nothing. That was only natural.

  Nothing could escape from inside a black hole.

  A special kind of nothing, though. Nothing that had formerly been light, before being stretched down to true nothingness in the act of climbing that steep slope.

  The two funnels merged closer still. The microscopic black balls drew nearer.

  Light trying to escape a black hole is reddened to non-existence. Nevertheless, virtual light can theoretically escape one nought, only to be sucked into the other. There, it starts blue-shifting exponentially, as gravity yanks it downward again.

  Between one event horizon and the other, the light doesn't "officially" exist. Not in the limiting case. Yet ideally, there should be a flow.

  They had not believed her on Kalimarn. Until one day she showed them it was possible, for the narrowest of instants, to tap the virtual stream. To squeeze between the red-shifted and blue-shifted segments. To catch the briefest glimpse—

  It happened too fast to follow with human eyes. One moment two black spheres were inching microscopically towards each other with the little, doomed instrumentality tortured and whining between them. The next instant, in a sudden flash, all contents of the tank combined and vanished. Space-time backlash set the reinforced vacuum chamber rocking—a side effect of that final stroke which severed forever all contact between the noughts and this cosmos where they'd been made. In the instant it took Isola to blink, they were gone, leaving behind the neatly severed end of fiber cable.

  Gone, but not forgotten. In taking the camera with them, the singularities had given it the moment it needed. The moment when "nothing" was no longer nothing but merely a deep red.

  And red is visible. . . .

  This was what had won her funding to seek out a partner and come here to Tenembro Nought. For if it was possible to look inside a microhole, why not a far bigger one that had been born in the titanic self-devouring of a star? So far, she and Mikaela hadn't succeeded in that part of the quest. Their research at the micro end, however, kept giving surprising and wonderful results.

  Isola checked to make sure all the secrets of the vanished nanonought had been captured during that narrow instant and were safely stored in memory. Its rules. Its nature as a cosmos all its own. She had varied the formation recipe again, and wondered what physics would be revealed this time.

  Before she could examine the snapshot of a pocket universe, however, her left eyelid twitched and came alight with a reminder. Time for her appointment. Damn.

  But Jarlquin had shown Isola how much more pleasant it was to be on time.

  The temperature of the universe is just under three degrees, absolute. It has chilled considerably, in the act of expanding over billions of years, from fireball to cosmos. Cooling in turn provoked changes in state. Delicately balanced forces shifted as the original heat diffused, allowing protons to form from quarks, then electrons to take orbit around them, producing that wonder, Hydrogen. Later rebalancings caused matter to gather, forming monstrous swirls. Many of these eddies coalesced and came alight spectacularly—all because the rules allowed it.

  Because the rules required it.

  Time processed one of those lights—by those selfsame rules—until it finished burning and collapsed, precipitating a fierce explosion and ejection of its core from the universe.

  Tenembro Nought sat as a fossil relic of that banishment. A scar, nearly healed, but palpable.

  All of this had come about according to the rules.

  "We've liberated ourselves from Darwin's Curse, but it still comes down to the same thing."

  The visitor made a steeple of her petite hands, long and narrow, with delicate fingers like a surgeon's. Her lips were full and dyed a rich mauve hue. Faint ripples passed across her skin as pores opened and closed rhythmically. A genetic gra
ft, Isola supposed. Probably some Vorpal trait inserted into Jarlquin's genome before she was even conceived.

  Fortunately, laws limit the gene trade, Isola thought. All they can ask of me is a simple cloning.

  Over Jarlquin's shoulder, through the window of the lounge, Isola saw the starscape and realized Smolin Cluster was in view. Subvocally, she ordered the magnifocus pane to enlarge one quadrant for her eye only. Flexing gently, imperceptibly to other visitors across the room, the window sent Isola a scene of suns like shining grains. One golden pinpoint—Pleasence Star—shone soft and stable. Its kind, by nature's laws, would last eons and never become a nought."