Furious Gulf

  To Toby the interior of the ergosphere was a sullen night, peppered by blinding, quick streaks of luminosity. Fever-bright pellets shot by them—a pelting shower in red and violet and a strange, hot green.

  “What . . . what is this place?” Toby whispered.

  Quath sent.

  “You mean the black hole?”

  Quath rattled and twirled her eye-stalks to illustrate.

  “Huh? Scrambles what?”

 

  “Well, I can see pretty near any part of the spectrum—”

 

  “How come we’re so dumb?” The luminous downpour outside hammered harder, the wall screen splashing the faces of everyone on the bridge with sparking, fleeting colors. No one moved. Argo shook and popped with unseen strains. Toby’s sour stomach told him that gravity was shifting restlessly, like a prowling beast.

 

  Toby grimaced. “Time is just what clocks tell, mother of maggots. Don’t fancy it up.”

 

  Toby shook his head, feeling woozy. “Too much for me.”

  The Bridge lay silent, awed. The bulk of the crew was crammed into the ship’s center, shielded against the sleeting particles that even Argo’s magnetic fields could not fully deflect. Toby and the others on the Bridge had taken a concoction drawn up by one of Jocelyn’s Aspects, to repair any radiation damage to their body cells. It was a milky drink that tasted like cinders somebody’d peed on, but Jocelyn said it held tiny critters that could fix up shattered molecules, stitch together broken structures, like a smidge of a seamstress.

  Right now Toby felt like the damage was all in his stomach. It lurched and squeezed as the direction of gravity swung and snaked like an unmoored cable. He held on to his couch and breathed through his mouth, not minding the saliva that fell from his lips—until it then looped through the air as gravity abruptly curled and pulsed—sending the warm gop back into his right eye.

  “Augh!”

  “You all right, son?” Killeen called.

  “Uh, yeah. Kinda woozy, is all.”

  Killeen gave him a quick, sympathetic smile. “Hold on. It’ll probably get worse.”

  Abruptly there rose in him a silent, stony presence—Shibo, her Personality sending silky fingers of reassurance into his sensorium. She did not speak, and he had not summoned her, but her essence laced the air, tinged his sight, brought delicate traceries of memory peeling like sheets from the granite-firm surface of her mind. Filigrees of olden, endless days, of sundappled calm and damp leafy bowers she had played in as a girl, of happy children’s laughter tinkling through a glade, of lip-smacking spicy meals shared with friends now gone—

  Uneasily he shrugged off these influences, his anxiety surfacing despite her silent efforts. “Dad, where are we going?”

  A rueful grimace. “I don’t know.”

  “But—” Yes, Toby thought, but—

  They both knew full well how dangerous this was, everybody knew, yet they flew on into the pit of the unknown. An abyss with no visible redemption. And for reasons none of them, not even the Cap’n, could express in words.

  Something shimmered in the wall screens.

  “Ship incoming,” Jocelyn said tensely.

  “Here?” Cermo whispered nearby. “A ship in this place?”

  A rustle of surprise, maybe hope.

  “Vector in,” Killeen said. “Our diagnostics working?”

  “Some are,” Jocelyn answered, fingers dashing over her control board. Argo’s computers would accept voice or touch commands, and seemed to blend the two to anticipate what its unlearned crew wanted.

  “How far away is it?” Killeen asked.

  “I can’t tell.” Jocelyn frowned. “The board says refraction makes it impossible to measure.”

  “Refraction?” Toby asked. Everybody ignored him, but his Isaac Aspect supplied,

  In curved space-time, light is warped. It cannot propagate in straight lines. No distance measurements are reliable. Or time measures, either.

  “That thing’s getting nearer,” Cermo said. “Bigger.”

  That may be an illusion, too, caused by the bending of light. Here nothing is what it seems, theory says.

  “What design is it?” Killeen asked.

  “Hard to tell,” Jocelyn answered, frowning. “Its image keeps jumping around.”

  “Kinda lumpy,” Cermo said.

  “Not like the Myriapodia craft,” Killeen mused.

  “Are those domes?” Jocelyn delicately tuned the sensors. “Bulges in the profile, see?”

  “Ummm. Could be. Mechs have bumps like that.”

  “Frap!” Jocelyn gritted her teeth. “Looks to be getting closer. If it’s mech, we’ll be wide open.”

 

  Killeen glanced back at Quath, startled. Toby had forgotten that the Bridge was tuned into Quath’s transmissions. He could not carry on a snug, private conversation with the alien any longer. The thought made him somehow sad.

  Killeen said, “Argo’s ancient. Last of its kind, prob’ly. Wouldn’t find anything like that here.”

 

  “Humans here?” Cermo asked. “I hope to God it’s so.”

  “Its color function is not smooth,” Jocelyn said crisply. No speculations for her; she kept eyes fixed on the flowing dynamics of her board.

  Killeen ceased his slow pacing and walked quickly to her side, fighting the jolts of vagrant gravity. The board showed a bewildering array of numbers, graphs, scattershot diagrams. Toby could piece them out, with some help—they were like the math lessons from Isaac—but Killeen had a long-standing impatience with such pesky details. “What’s that stuff mean?”

  “When the instruments scan across the image, even though it’s kinda watery, they can tell if it’s the same color. That ship has blotches on it.”

  “So?” Killeen ran a hand over the displays, as if he could feel their significance. Toby knew the puzzled impatience in his father’s face. Long years of trusting his wits made abstract instruments seem untrustworthy, no matter how advanced. Toby could sympathize; he felt pretty shaky, too, relying on devices he could not possibly figure out.

  “So maybe it’s damaged. Taken hits. Got holes in it, even.”

  “Likely it’s a warship, then.” Jocelyn frowned.

  On the screen a blue-white shape swam, shimmering and bobbing in the incessant streaking light-drops. The ship’s minds fretted over its identity and strobed UNKNOWN on the screen. Toby watched the bobbing, silvery ship and Quath said,

  “Huh? What?”

 

  “How can that be?”

 

  Toby swallowed, and not just from a new lurch of his couch. Before he could take in Quath’s meaning, Killeen
made a decision, smacking a palm on the board. “Can’t risk it being a warship, maybe mech. Prepare to fire on it.”

  Jocelyn replied crisply. “Ready for action.”

  “Wait!” Toby called. “You heard Quath. She says everything’s twisted down here. That ship could be from some different time, not following us at all.”

  “What’s time matter?” Killeen snapped. “A mech’s a mech.”

  “Dad, give that ship a little leeway. My Isaac Aspect, Quath, they both’re talking about how crazy it is here. Seems to me, until we understand—”

  Killeen glanced at his son and nodded to Jocelyn. “Keep a sharp eye. Stand ready. Armed.”

  “Armed, Cap’n.”

  “Dad!”

 

  Killeen studied the alien’s head and feelers, which swayed with the effort of compensating for the tides of gravity that swept through the Bridge like a pressure wind. “You sure?”

 

  “How many?”

 

  “Mech?”

  Quath sent a rippling, fizzy sound with this, which Toby did not know how to interpret. Wasn’t the ‘age of the mechanicals’ now—their time?

  Killeen seemed to understand, though, and nodded. “All right. Can you put your information on our screens?”

  Another mysterious series of fizzy, ringing notes.

  The ship on the screens waxed and waned in shimmering, heated luminosity. For a moment it sharpened. A scarred skin, once silver-smooth, now pocked and stained. Bulges that could be domes, but streaked and grimy.

  Jocelyn said, “Our pattern-recognition programs say that’s old human construction.”

  Killeen rubbed his chin. “Ummm, could be.”

  “It is!” Toby cried. The cut and angles struck a chord in him. Before he could say more, the clarity fled. A long moment of silence followed. The Bridge officers stared openly at their Cap’n. To fire on a human craft would be a great sin, but to die from a mech bolt . . .

  “Not mech, anyway,” Killeen conceded. “Stand down.”

  The tension on the Bridge broke. Officers murmured, rustled. Killeen resumed pacing. Toby was still watching the screens when the other ship’s image began to dwindle away. “Hey!” Jocelyn cried, working at her instruments. But the image faded like a plucked flower sinking into a dark pond.

  “Gone.” Killeen seemed relieved. “Maybe we were looking at a mirage all the time.”

 

  Onto the main screen popped two clocks. Toby had learned to read a digital clock on Argo, so he was startled to see one in blue keep ticking away at the rate he knew, while another in red spun its numbers past in a blur. Quath sent in response to his confusion.

  Toby watched the numerals spin, scarcely believing they could represent anything real. “You mean outside, time’s going fast?”

 

  “What makes it speed up, out there?”

 

  Toby couldn’t reckon how that could possibly be. “What happens when we go back out?”

 

  “Curvature?” Killeen intruded.

 

  “Gonna make it hard to find anything.”

 

  “So that’s why you call it a time pit?”

  Toby’s Isaac Aspect added,

  The black hole swallows space. Old Zeno says—though even her memory of these matters is from long before her real, bodily life—that we can regard it as if space slides into the hole’s gullet at ever-faster speed, as it nears the steepening angle of descent. Against this slippery slope even light labors to save itself. But the ergosphere is a chasm for time, not space. Here the duration of an event may stretch, compress, warp, as space—in-sliding, doomed space—plays and toys with it, twists the tail of time.

  Toby tried to get his mind around all this, as his stomach lurched with acid and the screens flashed. Streaking matter, bristling with radiation, spattered their ship. Toby thought woozily that maybe they were seeing God spit across the sky, a cosmic joke. “How . . . how do we find our way around?”

  Gravity may bend and turn a given sequence of events. Living in such a place is like being a bug doomed to crawl along a man’s belt, hanging in a closet. A belt, say, which has the tab flipped over, then fitted into the buckle. The bug can creep all it wants, and cover both sides of the belt—since now the leather really has only one side—but it can never get off. Events for the bug repeat endlessly, and the bug never reaches the end of its dreary, endless belt.

  The Aspect’s tinny voice had a disagreeable relish to it. “You talk about all this like you know it firsthand.”

  I studied these things, but alas, know them only from ancient texts. And from the dried-up Zeno, a truly disagreeable sort. She tells me of experiments humans once performed here. Even, she says, of constructions they made.

  “How could anybody build here?”

  Doubtless this is a transcription error, or doddering old Zeno’s errant memory. But I can quote to you from more reliable Chandelier texts. They often blended mythology and physics, a fashion of that great time—imagine, the luxury to do such! Still, for your edification I can lecture fully on—

  “Uh, no thanks.” Toby hastily pressed the Aspect back into its crevice.

  “What’s that?” Killeen asked, pointing at a glinting blackness that swam into view. To Toby it looked like a huge beehive, dark and oily and honeycombed with passages.

  Quath sent a trill of alarm.

  “Why?” Killeen demanded.

 

  Toby tried to figure how that could be. “Like slipping in a side door, one that blows open in the wind?”

 

  Killeen’s face tightened with uncertainty. “The aperture moment? Aperture means ‘opening,’ right? But an opening to what?”

 

  The ship trembled and groaned with new stresses. A shiny, oily blackness filled all the screens, immense and inescapable.

  TWO

  Honeycomb Home

  The glistening black thing seemed to unfold itself, swimming in the watery half-light. Toby realized that it was growing somehow. Emerging, like an ornate vessel rising from a slate-black lake. It appeared to ooze into the space nearby, drawn out of fitful storm-wracked darkness, as though emerging from some unseen, deeper place. Fresh ramparts and plains expanded along it, flinty and sharp-crested, faces of it catching the flashing illuminations that still shot by on all sides of them.

 

  Toby stared, blinked. Quath’s tone gave no hint that she shared the surprise Toby felt. The outside time digits now fled by in a blur.

  Killeen still stood on the creaking deck, shifting his weight to counter random thrusts. Face tense, he did no
t take his eyes from the stretching, spreading mass on the screens. “How much deeper can we go?”

 

  “Ummm,” Killeen said sardonically. “What isn’t possible here?”

  Jocelyn said tersely. “Fuel rate’s up.”

  Killeen nodded. “It’s been climbing all along. What’s our remaining margin?”

  “To be able to get free of this place?”

  “Yeasay—this ‘ergosphere.’” The word sat awkwardly on Killeen’s lips, Aspect jargon, like a language he only pretended to speak.

  The popping of strains running through Argo had distracted Toby from the gut-deep pulse of their engines. The laboring rumble rose, sending tremors through his couch.

  Jocelyn worked a moment, eyes dancing as she listened to her direct link with the ship’s systems. Worry-lines creasing her brow, she said, “The board’s working hard, calc’lating how much it’ll take to get out of here. These numbers keep jumping around. We’re getting close. Gobbling up fuel just to keep in an orbit, seems like.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe fifty minutes left.”

  Even to Toby’s practiced eye Killeen seemed unmoved by this. “I see.”

  Argo flew by sucking in plasma with magnetic mouths, burning it in fusion chambers, and spewing it out the back. But it needed catalysts for this, and they were running low.

 

  Toby was shocked at the matter-of-fact way Quath stated this, without even a softening further remark. Killeen also gave nothing away, his eyes fixed on the strange oily-black thing. “This object, it’s like a rock that grows. You sure it has nothing to do with this ‘event horizon’?”

 

  “How come you’re sure?”

 

  “That’ll be the star stuff, taking a nosedive into the black hole?” Killeen asked.