Beyond the Farthest Suns Read online

  Why hesitate? she asked herself. Because now, faced with the possibility of doing what she had started out to do—save Disjohn Fair­child at any cost—a miserable, cold sensibility started to creep in. She needed to think about it long and hard. There were too many considerations to weigh for a hasty decision.

  She made her way to the ship’s observation chamber. Far out on the needle-like boom which extended from the crew ball, an isolated, multi-sense chamber seemed to hang in dark space. But its walls were transparent only by illusion. Trillions of luminous cells provided adjustable images of anything within range of ship’s sensors, down to the finest detail a human eye could perceive. Images could be magnified, starbows undistorted into normal starfields for quick reference, or high-frequency energy shifted into vis­ual regions. If need demanded, such subtle effects as light distortion in higher geometries could be brought within human interpretation. The sphere could also synthesize programmed journeys and sound effects, or any combina­tion of fictions and synaesthesias.

  Anna requested a tour of the nearby singularities. “Will there be a specific sequence, madame?” the media com­puter asked.

  “Only an introductory tour. Explain what I’m seeing.”

  “Some singularities are made obvious by surrounding nebulae,” the voice-over began, along with the visual journey. “These are veils of super­nova dust and gas that have been expanding for hundreds of millions of years.” Fading in, wisps like mare’s-tail clouds in a sunset, backed by velvet space. Hidden within, a tiny spinning and glowing cloud, a pinprick, not worth noticing … geo­metric jaws gaping wide, tides deadly as any ravening star ­furnace.

  “Others are companions to dim red stars, and thus are heavy X-ray sources. They suck in matter from their neigh­bors, accelerate and heat it through friction, and absorb it in bottomless wells.

  “There is no comprehensive explanation why the major­ity of the Rift stars supernovaed within ten million years of each other, half an eon ago, but the result is a treacherous graveyard of black holes, white dwarfs, and a few dim giants. They all affect each other across the close-packed Rift in complex patterns.

  “Some can be seen through distortion of the stellar background. The rings of stars around a black hole show the effects of gravitational lensing. Light is captured and orbited above the event horizons, producing two primary images and a succession of weaker images caused by anomalies in the spinning singularity. Gas falling into the holes produces hot points of high ­energy radiation, red-shifted into the visual spectrum by enormous gravitational fields. These are surrounded by rings of stars, images of stars from every angle—every visible object, including those behind the observer. There are gaps of darkness and then succeeding rings like the bands on an inter­ferometer plate, finally blending into star-images undeviated by the singularity.”

  She was reminded of electronic Christmas ornaments from her childhood. Anna knew what she saw lay only a few million miles away, so close her ship could reach out to touch it in mere minutes.

  “Dear God,” she murmured. To fall into one of those things would be to transcend any past experience of death. They were miracles, jesters of spacetime. Her eyes filled with tears which nearly broke their tension bonds to drift away in free-fall.

  “Where no such diffractions and reflections are visible, perhaps absorbed in dark nebulosities, and where no X-ray or Thrina sources give clues, naked singularities stripped of their event horizons lurk like invisible teeth. These have been charted by evidence obtained in protogeometry warps. There is no other way to know they exist.”

  The Thrina song of a nearby singularity was played to her. It sounded like the wailing of lost children, sweetly mixed with a potent bass boum, an echoing cave-sound, ghost-­sound, preternatural mind-sound. “No reason is known for the existence of the Thrina song. It is connected with sin­gularities as an unpredictable phenomenon of radiating and patterned energy, perhaps in some way directed by intel­ligence.”

  Nestor left the sphere and drifted quickly back through the extension to the crew-ball.

  Her hands shook.

  Kamon followed and waited. A ship could remain in half phase only so long before its unintentional mass loss (how easily he had spotted and avoided the ghosts!) reached a critical level.

  His shipmate meditated and fasted alone in her cabin. Kamon was left with the silent computers—it was blasphemous for an Aighor machine to have a voice­—and a few aides to see to his food and wastes. He preferred it that way.

  At one point he even ordered them to clear away the captain’s smashed body so he might be more alone.

  The Venging was close. He had had no further contact with the Council at Frain or any other Aighor agencies. He had spotted and charted the course of Anna Sigrid Nestor’s ship, and felt his own sort of appreciation at the intuition she was following him personally. She was on her own Venging.

  Such was the dominance pattern of humans.

  “Four minutes thirty seconds before critical point,” Graetikin said. Lady Fairchild gripped her husband’s arm tighter. For a society woman she was holding up remark­ably well, Graetikin thought.

  The worst was yet to come. Kamon would inevitably chase them down, and there was only one chance left. Graetikin’s recent equations implied they would survive if they took that chance, but how they would survive—in what condition, other than whole and alive—was unknown. It was a terrifying prospect.

  “We have to leave half-phase,” Fairchild said. “And we have to outrun him. There’s no other way.” Edith nodded and turned away from the bridge consoles.

  “Have you ever wondered why he called a Venging?” she asked.

  “What?” Fairchild asked. He was focusing on the blank viewers, as if to strain some impossible clue from them. It was useless to look at half-phase exteriors, however. The eye interpreted them as if they weren’t there, and indeed half the time they weren’t.

  “Kamon has to have a reason,” Edith said, louder.

  “I’m sure he does,” Graetikin said.

  “I’ve been trying to find out what that reason is. I might have a clue.”

  “That doesn’t concern us now,” Fairchild said, irritated. “Reason or no, we have to get away from him.”

  “But doesn’t it help to know what we’re going to die for?” Edith cried. “You know damn well we can’t outrun him! Graetikin knows it, too. Don’t you?”

  Graetikin nodded. “But I wouldn’t say we’re going to die. There might be another way.”

  “You know that?” Fairchild asked.

  Graetikin nodded. “First, I’d like to hear what Lady Fairchild has to say about Kamon’s motive.”

  Disjohn took a deep breath and held up his arms. “Okay,” he said to his wife, “Lady Ethnographer, tell us.”

  “It’s all in the library, for whoever cares to look it up. Some of it is even in the old books. We’ve known about it for a century at least—the basic form of the Aighor pil­grimage. They have three brains, that’s well-known—but we’ve ignored the way they use those brains. One is for rational purposes, and it can do everything a computer can do, but it isn’t the strongest. Another is for emotive and autonomic purposes, and that’s where the seat of their re­ligion is. We don’t know exactly what the third brain does. But I have an idea it’s used for preparing the other two brains for a proper death. It has to balance them out, me­diate. If the rational brain has an edge, the pilgrim won’t be prepared for death. I think the research conducted by the station gave the Aighors a dilemma they couldn’t face—the rational treatment of subjects hitherto purely religious to them. It gave their rational minds an edge and caused an imbalance. So the pilgrims couldn’t be delivered to the black holes without wholesale failure in the proper rituals of dying.”

  “And?” Graetikin asked, fingering his stylus. It seemed there was another foot to drop in the matter, and she wasn�
��t dropping it.

  “That’s it. I can’t speculate any further. I’m not really an ethnographer. But sometimes I wish to hell you had been, dear husband!” There was no bitterness in her voice, only a loving rebuke.

  Fairchild stared stonily at the emp­ty screens.

  “You have another way?” he asked Graetikin.

  “It’s possible,” Graetikin said. He outlined his alternative. From the ninth word on Fairchild went pale, convinced his Captain had broken under the strain.

  Anna lay in the half-dark and watched the young man dress. For the first time in years she felt guilt that her emotional needs should draw her away from constant alertness. But this was the first time she’d been with the handsome lad for anything more than companionship. He had proven serviceable enough and charming.

  Her aging frame didn’t bother him. He was a professional and perhaps more than that, a sympathetic human being.

  “I don’t understand all you’ve told me,” he said. His brown skin shined in the golden lamps of the sanitoire. “But I think what you’re asking me is, do you have a right to put your whole crew in danger. You’re the captain, and I signed on—”

  “Not as a crew-member,” she reminded him.

  “No, but I signed on with the understanding there might be hazards involved.”

  “These aren’t the normal hazards.”

  “But if it serves your purpose to link up with the other ship, how can I or anyone else persuade you not to?”

  “I have responsibilities to the people who work for me.” She was reminded of what Kondrashef had said to her. Even if they could link up with the Fair­child ship, what guarantee did she have that the Heuritex’s predictions were completely accurate? They didn’t know precisely what Kamon’s ship was capable of. Already they’d been surprised several times. And her first lieutenant, Nilsbaum, had worked the problem out on an alternate com­puter, a human-manufacture Datapak. It had given them an eighty percent chance of hitting a singularity if they linked and performed a protogeometry jump. The Heu­ritex had disagreed. But still, the danger existed.

  “I can’t blast the bastard,” Anna said, “because every pot­shot is registered by the tattling machines I had to hook up to pass USC regulations. I can’t tamper with them—they retreat into stasis whenever they’re not registering.”

  She looked sharply at the Polynesian. He looked back at her, his face blank and expectant. “Go take a shower,” she said. Then, softer, “Please. You’ve helped me—very much.” She turned over and relaxed to the sounds of the door closing and water running.

  She was staring at the drifting colors on the nacreous ceiling when the intership chimed. She reached over to depress the switch and listened half-drowsily. The voice of the Heuritex brought her fully awake.

  “Madame, we’ve contacted Fairchild’s ship. First Lieu­tenant Nilsbaum requests your presence on the bridge.”

  “I’ll be there. Any answer from Disjohn?”

  “He refuses to allow a link-up. He says he has two reasons—first, that he will not jeopardize your life; and second, that his computers predict failure if such a plan is carried out. I don’t understand these machines of human construc­tion.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “He warned you to leave.”

  She rolled over in bed and cupped her chin in her hands. The shower was still running. “Another question,” she said.

  “Yes, madame.”

  “What happens if we hit a black hole?”

  “Depending on the angle of impact, we have several var­ieties of doom. If we go straight in, perpendicular to a tangent, we pass through two or more event horizons, de­pending on the theoretical geometry you subscribe to.”

  “What are event horizons?”

  “Simply the horizons beyond which no further events can be seen. The gravitational field at that point has accelerated any particle close to the speed of light. From an outside point of view, the particle’s time has slowed to almost zero, no motion at all, so it will take an infinite time to hit the singularity below the event horizon.

  “But from our point of view—if we are the hypothetical particle—we will hit it. Not that it will matter to us, though. Long before we pass through the inner event horizon, tidal forces will strip us down to subatomic particles.”

  “Not too pleasant.”

  “No, but there are other options. At a lesser angle, we might pass through an outer event horizon at a speed suf­ficient to propel us into another geometry, and out again someplace else—a different place and time in our own uni­verse, perhaps, or in another universe. We might survive that, if certain theoretical conditions prove true—though it would be a rough trip and the ship might not emerge in one piece.”

  “How can there be more than one event horizon?”

  “Because black holes rotate. May I draw you a compari­son of two Kruskal-Szekeres diagrams?”

  “By all means,” Anna said, activating the display screen on the intership.

  But the mosaic-like charts did little to help her compre­hension. She had forgotten most of her physics decades before.

  “Out of half-phase,” Kamon said to himself, “now!”

  The image reappeared. He had misjudged the geodesic slightly. The ship was a light-hour farther away than he had predicted, which meant the ship’s appearance was an hour off from actual emergence. He felt a brief confusion. But the ruse—if ruse it was—had gained them a very small advantage.

  He immediately switched to subspace sensors.

  Fairchild’s ship was over four light-hours away. More disturbing, it was heading toward a nebulosity which charts said contained three collapsars, two of them black holes. Kamon deftly probed the nebula with his protogeometry sensors.

  None of these singularities had ever been used for pilgrimages, thus they did not radiate Thrina songs. The area had not been thoroughly charted except on visual and radio levels from thousands of light-years away, where the patterns of the roiling gas-clouds had given away the pres­ence of hidden collapsars.

  His scan revealed another member in the family, elusive and sacred: a naked singu­larity. The very presence of humans in such a region was sacrilege—and if they were choosing suicide over destruc­tion at his hands, the danger was unthinkable. A shudder racked his entire body. He had heard of hu­mans going insane under stress, but if they fell into a sin­gularity here, the Venging was a failure and the Rift would never be sacred again.

  He forced himself to be calm. They wouldn’t know how to prepare themselves for the Fall. They knew nothing about the mental ritual involved. It would be, in effect, nothing more than a suicide.

  Or it might be something much worse, for them.

  But Kamon would take no chances. He must destroy them before they ever reached the cloud. For the first time he felt anxiety that he might fail, even fear.

  “It can’t be done!” Lady Fairchild shouted. “Disjohn, I’m not ignorant! I know what those things are. Graetikin has to be insane to think we can survive that!”

  “I’ve heard him explain it. The computers back him up.”

  “Yes, on his assumptions!”

  “He’s on to something new. He knows what he’s talking about—and he’s right. We don’t have any other choice. The Aighor has every advantage over us, including reli­gious zeal—as you pointed out. We’ve tested our course on the computers again and again. We have one chance in a thousand of coming out alive. With Graetikin’s plan, our chances are at least a hundred times greater.”

  “We’re going to die, is what you’re saying, either way.”

  “Probably. But there’s something grand about this way of going. It robs Kamon of his goal. We hold the upper hand now.”

  “You know what will happen if we suicide in one of the singularities?” Edith asked.

  “We don’t pl
an on suiciding.”

  “Just going down one, we make this entire region useless to them for their pilgrimages. Mixing souls is an abomination to them, just as mixing meat and milk is to an orthodox Jew.”

  “There was a hygienic reason not to mix meat and milk.”

  Such bloody-minded rationalism. “Are we so materialistic that we can’t see a reason for this kind of tabu?”

  Fairchild swung out his hands and turned away from her, talking loudly to the wall. “Damn it, Edith, we have to use Occam’s razor! We can’t multiply our hypotheses until we avoid stepping on cracks for fear of killing our mothers. We’re rational beings! Kamon has that advantage over us—he is not acting rationally. He’s on a Venging, like a goddamned berserker, and he’s got a faster, better armed ship. We’re doomed! What should we do, bare our breast to him and shout ‘mea culpa?’”

  Edith shook her head. “I don’t know. I just feel so lost.”

  Fairchild shivered. His teeth clicked together and he wrapped his arms around himself. “You’re not alone. I’m petrified. We’re about to do something no one else has ever done.”

  “Except Aighors,” Edith reminded him. “And they’ve al­ways been prepared for it.”

  “He won’t let us dock with him, he’s turning toward the singularities—there’s nothing more I can do,” Anna said. “He’s choosing suicide rather than death at Kamon’s hands. Or is he up to something else?”

  “I can offer no explanation, madame. Either something has malfunctioned or they have gone insane.”

  “I hate Kondrashef,” Anna said quietly. “He has always been right, has always given advice I could never follow—and he’s always been so damned, irrefutably correct. But I’ve got to follow my own wyrd.” She sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Can they receive any messages now?”

  “They are in the cloud. There’s too much interference.”

  “Veer off. Circle to the opposite side of the nebula and see if anything emerges on that end. I’ve met Fairchild’s captain—he’s a brilliant man. He may have more up his sleeve than we can know.”