Stephen Baxter - The Gravity Mine

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Call her Anlic.

The first time she woke she was in the ruins of an abandoned gravity mine.

At first the Community had chased around the outer strata of the great gloomy structure. But at

last, close to the core, they reached a cramped ring. Here the central black hole’s gravity was so

strong that light itself curved in closed orbits.

The torus tunnel looked infinitely long. And they could race as fast as they dared.

As they hurtled past fullerene walls they could see multiple images of themselves, a glowing

golden mesh before and behind, for the echoes of their light endlessly circled the central knot of

spacetime. "Just like the old days!" they called, excited. "Just like the Afterglow. . . !"

Exhilarated, they pushed against the light barrier, and those trapped circling images shifted to

blue or red.

That was when it happened.

This Community was just a small tributary of the Conflux: isolated here in this ancient place, the

density of mind already stretched thin. And now, as lightspeed neared, that isolation stretched to

breaking point.

. . . She budded off from the rest, her consciousness made discrete, separated from the greater

flow of minds and memories.

She slowed. The others rushed on without her, a dazzling circular storm orbiting the exhausted

black hole. It felt like coming awake, emerging from a dream.

Her questions were immediate, flooding her raw mind. "Who am I? How did I get here?" And so

on. The questions were simple, even trite. And yet they were unanswerable.

Others gathered around her–curious, sympathetic–and the race of streaking light began to lose its

coherence.

One of them came to her.

Names meant little; this "one" was merely a transient sharpening of identity from the greater

distributed entity that made up the Community.

Still, here he was. Call him Geador.

". . . Anlic?"

"I feel–odd," she said.

"Don’t worry."

"Who am I?"

"Come back to us."

He reached for her, and she sensed the warm depths of companionship and memory and shared

joy that lay beyond him. Depths waiting to swallow her up, to obliterate her questions.

She snapped, "No!" And, willfully, she sailed up and out and away, passing through the thin

walls of the tunnel.

At first it was difficult to climb out of this twisted gravity well. But soon she was rising through

layers of structure.

Here was the tight electromagnetic cage that had once tapped the spinning black hole like a

dynamo. Here was the cloud of compact masses that had been hurled along complex orbits

through the hole’s ergosphere, extracting gravitational energy. It was antique engineering, long

abandoned.

She emerged into a blank sky, a sky stretched thin by the endless expansion of spacetime.

Geador was here. "What do you see?"

"Nothing."

"Look harder." He showed her how.

There was a scattering of dull red pinpoints all around the sky.

"They are the remnants of stars," he said.

He told her about the Afterglow: that brief, brilliant period after the Big Bang, when matter

gathered briefly in clumps and burned by fusion light. "It was a bonfire, over almost as soon as it

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Stephen Baxter - The Gravity Mine

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