Flies from the Amber

by Wil McCarthy

  And on the atomic level, more strange than anything anyone had ever examined. Holding it up against conventional matter, he could perceive little in the way of family resemblance.

  “Damn it,” Yezu said, startling Tom from his thoughts.

  “What?”

  “I can't... We need that mix data from Port Chrysanthemum. We won't get much further on this track without it.”

  “Oh.” Tom had no idea what they might need the mix data for, but this hardly surprised him. He felt awed by Yezu's progress. And yes, a little annoyed as well; in a properly functioning universe, Tom's colleagues labored in his shadow, never the reverse. Still, they'd gotten a week's work done in only a few hours and the results... Well, they were fascinating, to say the least!

  “Maybe we needed a break anyway,” he said. Port Chrysanthemum's reply would not reach them for at least another hour. “Maybe we can go talk to Dade.”

  Yezu eyed him narrowly. “You think I owe him an apology.”

  “Yes, well,” Tom said.

  “I don't think so. I... Well, I could stop acting so unfriendly, I suppose.”

  “Shall we, then?”

  “Oh, all right. Lead the way.”

  They unstrapped and rose from their stations, feet sliding unsteadily on the deck until they got their balance adjusted. Then, a quick skate down the length of the ship. In Wedge's narrow, linear spaces they soon came upon Dade Soames, curled up in his coffin-bunk, playing with a hand-held data unit of some sort.

  “Hello,” Tom offered, tentatively.

  Dade looked up. “Oh, salutes to you. How is the analysis going?”

  “Very well,” Tom said. “Very well indeed. But we've come to an impediment of sorts. Until some data arrives, we've put ourselves off duty.”

  “Well, that's nice.” Dade put his data unit away in the tiny locker behind his head, and removed from it another object. A plastic bottle, long-necked and with a pointed straw-spout sticking out the top of it. The sort of thing one used to carry and dispense beverages in microgravity. He sat up as much as space allowed, and kicked his blanket down toward his feet. “Yezu, I have a peace offering.”

  Frowning, Yezu reached out to touch the bottle. “Yes? A bribe to clear your conscience?”

  “It's fire wheat whiskey,” Dade said, pressing the bottle into Yezu's hand. “Not exactly a bribe, though—it's not the best stuff. Besides, I won't let you drink it without me.”

  “Really,” Yezu said, neutrally. He sniffed the end of the straw. Took a small sip from it. Frowned again.

  “A bigger hit will kill the taste a little,” Dade suggested.

  Yezu squeezed, leaned back a little, took down a good swallow. Yellow-brown liquor sloshed gently, slowly inside the bottle as he lowered it. His frown had deepened. “I've tasted furniture polish better than this.”

  Dade smiled a little. “I used to keep better, but the guys kept stealing it. This is the nastiest stuff I could find.”

  “I believe it,” Yezu said, handing the bottle back.

  “Does sort of warm you up, though, doesn't it?”

  “Yes, but... not in a good way.”

  Dade raised the bottle, took a healthy tug at the straw. Grimaced. “Bleah. I always forget just how awful this is. Darkness.”

  Still grimacing, he offered the bottle to Tom.

  “Uh, no.” Tom said, recoiling a bit. “Thank you anyway.”

  But Dade held the bottle out still, shaking it, waving it in Tom's face, and with a sigh, Tom took it and, reluctantly, sipped from it. Fire burned across his tongue, continued to burn there as it spread down his throat and into his stomach. He fought not to make a face, and lost the fight.

  “Oh, my word,” he said around his grimace. “I've never tasted worse.”

  He passed the bottle back to Dade, who drank from it and passed it to Yezu. Who drank from it and passed it back to Tom again. Who, against his better judgment, drank from it once more.

  “Now I'll have two reasons to be angry at you,” Yezu said to Dade, after choking down his third sip.

  A crewmate leaned out from another bunk. Shipman Lake. “Hey, you drinking Dade's whiskey? Darkness, you're brave.”

  To shut the man up, Dade passed him the bottle, and after drinking, Shipman Lake did in fact retreat, wincing and shuddering, back into his shadows. “Quaking hell,” he muttered, or something very like that.

  “You know,” Dade said to Yezu, “It doesn't take relativity to shake your life apart.”

  Yezu looked at him with a sort of cautious curiosity, and gave a little sideways nod to show he was listening.

  “You went to sea,” Dade continued. He looked weary, perhaps a little sad. “You put career travel above your marriage, and your marriage broke under the strain. The story is as old as civilization.”

  “Dade used to be married to that Power Board lady from Verva,” said Shipman Lake from his bunk.

  “Really?” said Tom.

  Dade nodded, taking another pull at the fire wheat whiskey.

  Yezu took the bottle, took another drink of his own. “Do you miss her? Do you sometimes wonder if you can... you know, if she'll...”

  “It was a long time ago,” Dade said, holding up a hand to slow Yezu's obvious dip toward despair. “We were married thirty-eight years, but...” He shook his head, definitely looking unhappy now. “Decades ago. Yes, I still miss her sometimes.”

  “Thirty-eight standard years?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah,” Dade said quietly. And that put things nicely in perspective; Unua completed each orbit around Vano in just over seventy days. An eyeblink, a moment. Tom didn't think they even called it an “Unuan year,” called it anything at all. But even at Tom's age thirty-eight standard, Terran years seemed an awfully long time.

  “There's a lot of misfortune to be rationed out,” Dade said. “We all choke down our share.”

  And then, thoughtful silence took the place of conversation for a while as the bottle made its rounds.

  Eventually, Techman Boyce skated up, goggles riding up once more on his forehead. Tom stuck the bottle out at him.

  Boyce didn't take the bottle, and pressed it off to one side when Tom held it up closer to his face. “Doctor Kreider,” he said. “I've got your transmission from the Introspectia. I think you'd better come look at it.”

  “Oh,” Tom said, feeling disappointed somehow. Since the very dawn of civilization, human males had honored the Ritual of Bad Liquor, and Tom had just begun to feel a sense of connection to all those departed pioneers. Firelight and earthen mugs, sincere but empty fisticuff threats... By refusing the bottle, by raising the specter of real work, Boyce had effectively broken the spell.

  “What's so important?” Dade asked irritably.

  “Just,” Techman Boyce looked unsettled. “Just come look at the message, okay?”

  “Darkness,” Dade said, struggling out of the bunk and unfolding himself, working out kinks in his elbows and knees.

  So Tom and Yezu and Dade followed Techman Boyce to the comm station.

  The face of an Introspectia crewmate was frozen there on a holie screen, little jagged lines frozen across the image like razor wire. Something familiar about that face... Yes! He was the young man who'd burst in on Captain Chelsea at the reception, leading her out from under the Red King's nose. Why would he be calling Tom aboard the Wedge?

  Boyce worked a couple of controls, and the razor wire vanished, and the man's face unfroze and began to speak: “This is Miguel Barta, Chief Technical Officer aboard the Solar Commercial Starship Introspectia. I am trying to reach Professor Tomus Kreider. This message is urgent.

  “Professor Kreider, I'd like to ask you to drop whatever you are working on and examine a new problem for me. I recognize my presumption in this, but I trust you'll agree with my reasoning. We have discovered a group of objects buried deep in the Soleco gravity well. I count between one and two hundred objects, ellipsoidal in shape, approximately eighty meters in diameter.

&nbs
p; “I repeat, we have identified at least one hundred ellipsoidal objects buried in the Soleco gravity well!

  “At the radius of the objects' orbits, gravity gradient covers a range between ten million and one hundred million per second squared. No material listed in Introspectia's library is capable of withstanding even a fraction of a percent of the resulting tidal stress. We've collected and re-collected our data, analyzed and re-analyzed it. We waited this long to ensure the validity of our conclusions, and by now we have a very high level of confidence.

  “Please understand the magnitude of this discovery! Without our most advanced instruments, we couldn't even measure conditions so close to Soleco's event horizon. The physical survival of physical objects under such circumstances... Professor, we have no understanding of this phenomenon.

  “I don't have anything more to say. Please... respond to this message as soon as you possibly can.”

  Miguel Barta's face froze again, and the jagged razor wire sprang up once more in front of it.

  “Darkness,” Dade said with a low breath.

  Yezu cleared his throat. “It seems... Perhaps we've come for something important after all.”

  Chapter Nine

  Miguel cursed at the equipment, wishing he could pound on it until it did what he wanted. Such slow communication—if only he could send and receive some goddamn personality faxes! Passive radio transmissions across the breadth of Malhela system...

  He stayed awake through four straight shifts, sending and receiving and collating and relaying and banging his forehead against the panel in frustration. Still, conversation of a sort did emerge over time, and the summary in his log file looked like this:

  BARTA:What holds these objects together? Could the centrokrist material survive these stresses?

  DIETRE:I don't think so. Checking... No, it has nowhere near the required tensile strength. Centrokrist only beats our best materials by a factor of a hundred or so.

  QUINT:I don't think any atomic bond could hold so strongly.

  KREIDER:Wait a minute. We know the mass of unbroken centrokrist increases logarithmically with volume. Probably, the gravitic interaction between exotic quarks is responsible for this. We've never seen a really large sample, but I can tell you it would have a low mass, in comparison to its size.

  DIETRE:What's that got to do with anything?

  KREIDER:Less mass in the same gravity means less tensile stress. Let's think about this. Could someone have designed this material specifically to survive in high gravity gradients?

  MANAKA:What purpose do these objects serve?

  BARTA:None that I can imagine. Nothing exists down there, just a kind of very, very diffuse haze.

  KREIDER:We have got a timescale for alien activity in this system, from the dated centrokrist deposits here in the Centromo. The depositions and impact histories come in around nine hundred and eighty million years. At that time a nebula covered this whole area, right? An awful lot has changed since then.

  DIETRE:Alien activity? Let's not jump to conclusions.

  QUINT:Oh, come on, Dietre! Can you seriously suggest a natural origin for all this? If so, I'd like to hear it.

  MANAKA:Won't the objects just spiral into the hypermass? No? Tomus says no. Very well, then, colleagues, let's congratulate ourselves; we've discovered an entirely new sort of fossil.

  BARTA:Come again, Doctor?

  MANAKA:The gravity gradient you were talking about; you measured it in seconds squared.

  KREIDER:One over seconds squared.

  MANAKA:Yes, fine, but do you see? It has to do with time.

  DIETRE: Only indirectly. We measure the spacetime slope in gravities per meter. Meters per second squared, per meter. All the units cancel, right? Except the seconds.

  BARTA:Doctor Manaka has a point, one I've studied rather closely. With gravitic spacetime distortion, plus the velocity necessary for a circular orbit, the ellipsoids remain in a highly dilated time frame. Even the least affected of them ages at only a thousandth of our rate.

  MANAKA:Yes! Fossils, buried in a kind of strata! Like flies in a drop of amber.

  BARTA:Black amber, Doctor. Gravitational redshift stretches everything out to thermal noise, barely distinguishable from cosmic background. I've taken most of my data from gravity imbalances, but I can barely distinguish those, either. Some neutrino tracings, shadows in the Hawking radiation...

  DIETRE:I have a lot of trouble with all this, with the extremes of it. How closely do these objects orbit the hypermass?

  BARTA:From what I've observed, none of them are more than a hundred meters above the event horizon.

  QUINT:Good heaven!

  DIETRE:Oh.

  KRIEDER:Good heaven!

  MANAKA:Time machines. Well, time capsules anyway. Fossils by design, you see? I speculate, of course, but it does make sense. Can we possibly retrieve them?

  QUINT:Impossible.

  DIETRE:Impossible.

  BARTA:I don't think so, Doctor Manaka. If you like, I can walk you through the math.

  MANAKA:Tomus has offered to do that. Damn. What luck we have, finding things we cannot hold on to!

  BARTA:Yes.

  KREIDER:The crewmates here on Wedge want to know if you have talked to Unua yet.

  QUINT:Port Chrysanthemum has become a rumor hive.

  BARTA:Captain Chelsea will talk to the president very soon, I think. Ladies, gentlemen? Forgive me, please, but I haven't slept in a long time. I'll leave you to your work.

 

  And so, Miguel brushed a handful of remotes off his panel, watched them scatter, then promptly yielded his station to Tech Aid Lahler. He went then to his cabin and, with minimal tossing and turning, slept.

  ~~~

  “Check mate,” Yezu said, for the third time that shift.

  Tom sighed. Since Introspectia's last transmission, Yezu had scurried from task to task, wanting all at once to suit up and go outside, to stay in and run some simulations, to continue the conversation with the scientists at Port Chrysanthemum, to sleep. Tom had finally convinced him to calm down and play a bit of chess, but Yezu's nervous energy had carried over to this, as well.

  “Good game,” Tom said.

  Silently, they moved the magnetized pieces back to their starting positions. Tom, cross-legged on a box on the floor, had to stretch his arm halfway up the bulkhead to reach the hand-painted board. Yezu hung upside down from a pipe on the corridor's “ceiling,” leaning and turning at the waist to reach his own pieces.

  Even with the low gravity, the pose looked uncomfortable in the extreme. But Yezu had offered no complaint.

  “Can I play the winner?” Dade asked. He had watched them for hours, occasionally asking questions of them, occasionally smiling smugly to himself.

  “Perhaps you'd rather play the loser,” Tom suggested.

  Dade sniffed, rubbed his nose. “Tomus, I've been playing this game since I was eight. Who do you think painted the board here?”

  “You did that?”

  “Good guess. Are you up for another round, Yezu?”

  Yezu blinked, seemed to think for a few fidgety moments. “I feel as if we have a lot to do, but really I suppose we don't. How frustrating! We must wait, always wait and wait and wait, and we don't even know what for.”

  “Shall I take that as a 'yes?'“

  “I suppose so. Yes, damn it, I'll keep playing. I must say, you seem awfully calm about this. Your crewmates, too, seem not very excited at all. Alien artifacts!”

  Tomus vacated his position, and, shrugging, Dade assumed it. “Try to remember, Yezu, we've been living with centrokrist for eighty years. We were never sure it was an artifact, but... well, maybe we were sure. Anyway, you get used to it.”

  Yezu pursed his mouth sourly. “This discovery won't change your life, eh?”

  “No,” said Dade. “With all that time compression and tidal force and whatnot, no. If I can't touch it and it can't touch me, then it's just a curiosity. And I
guess I'm not all that curious. You understand?”

  “No,” Yezu said, shaking his head. “Not at all. Not at all.”

  “Well, just my opinion. Maybe it doesn't make any sense. It's your move, by the way.”

  ~~~

  “Darkness,” Jafre snarled as he switched off the telkom, blanking the white-haired visage of Lin Chelsea. “Quaking whore.”

  The Terrans were finally, really, actually here, on the cutting edge of nowhere. Ready to take Jafre away, yes? Nothing here but earrings and coat buttons, as easily studied on Earth as on Port Chrysanthemum. More easily. And yet somehow, despite his best efforts, the Terrans had gone and found something big, something that would hold them here longer, maybe much longer, than they had really expected. Damnation and darkness!

  He would have to think about this. Chelsea would expect him to reply, his eyes and voice dripping with wonderment and gratitude. How fortunate we are for your presence! Something like that. Darkness, how much shit was he going to have to eat to pull something like that off?

  He considered getting some coffee to nurse while he thought about it, but no. The caffeine would chew on his nerves, chew on his stomach and bladder. Herbal tea, perhaps? No, no. Why, at times like this, did he feel such need to hold hot drink in his hands? What useless instinct had he tapped into? Forget it, forget it—something was happening here that had never happened before, and he was going to need all his wits to work the curves.

  Working curves was something Jafre knew how to do. He felt the old, bitter strength beginning to stir inside him. He would make something of this situation. When Ralfh Chang faced him down in the senate, back in '39, Jafre had spoken names, had pulled favors and leveled threats. Calling up the magic, feeling it flow through his hands. The shriveled, desiccated husk of Chang had been carried from the field, soulless and without future. Five decades ago. And Jafre had sharpened his claws on many bodies since then!

  Captain Chelsea, he dictated in his head, trying out a friendly but businesslike tone. Your discovery sounds very interesting. Please return at once to Port Chrysanthemum for consultation. Please also refrain from telling anyone else about this until the Unuan government has had time to assess potential impacts. I do hope you and I will have opportunity to talk.