David Brin - What Continues And What Fails

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WHAT CONTINUES … AND WHAT FAILS …

David Brin

Black. As deep as night is black between the stars.

Deeper than that. Night isn’t really black, but a solemn, utter shade of red.

As black, then, as Tenembro Nought, which drinks all colour, texture, substance, from around it, giving back only

its awful depth of presence.

But no. She had found redness of an immeasurably profound hue, emerging from that awful pit in space. Not even

the singularity was pure enough to typify true blackness. Nor was Isola’s own dark mood, for that matter – although,

since the visitors’ arrival, she had felt smothered, robbed of illumination.

In comparison, a mere ebony lustre of skin and hair seemed too pallid to dignify with the name ‘black’. Yet, those

traits were much sought after on Pleasence World, one of many reasons a fetch ship had come all this way to claim the

new life within her.

The foetus might know blackness, Isola thought, laying a hand over her curved abdomen, feeling a stirring there.

She purposely used cool, sterile terms, never calling it ‘baby’, or a personalised ‘she’. Anyway, when is a foetus’s

sensory innervation up to ‘knowing’ anything at all? Can one who has never seen light comprehend blackness?

Leaning towards the dimly illuminated field-effect mirror, Isola touched its glass-smooth, silky cool,

pseudo-surface. Peering at her own reflection, she found at last what she was looking for.

That’s it. Where light falls, never to emerge again.

She brought her face closer still, centring on one jet pupil, an inky well outlined by a dark iris – the universe

wherein she dwelt.

“It is said nothing escapes from inside a black hole, but that isn’t quite so.”

Mikaela was well into her lecture when Isola slipped into the theatre, late but unrepentant. A brief frown was her

partner’s only rebuke for her tardiness. Mikaela continued without losing a beat.

“In this universe of ours, the rules seem to allow exceptions even to the finality of great noughts …”

Isola’s vision adapted and she discreetly scanned the visitors – six space travellers whose arrival had disrupted a

quiet, monastic research routine. The guests from Pleasence World lounged on pseudo-life chaises overlooking

Mikaela and the dais. Each sleek-furred settee was specially tuned to the needs of its occupant. While the three

humans in the audience made little use of their couch amenities – only occasionally lifting fleshy tubes to infuse

endorphin-laced oxygen, the squat, toadlike Vorpal and pair of slender Butins had already hooked up for full breathing

symbiosis.

Well, they must have known they were coming to a rude outpost station, built with only a pair of humans in mind.

Isola and Mikaela had not expected guests until a few months ago, when the decelerating starship peremptorily

announced itself, and made its needs known.

Those needs included the use of Isola’s womb.

“Actually, there are countless misconceptions about gravitational singularities, especially the massive variety

formed in the recoil of a supernova. One myth concerns the possibility of communicating across a black hole’s event

horizon, to see what has become of all the matter which left this universe so violently and completely, long ago.”

Mikaela turned with a flourish of puffy sleeves towards the viewing tank. Winking one eye, she called up a new

image to display in mid-air, above the dais. Brilliance spilled across Mikaela’s fair skin and the visitors’ multi-hued

faces, causing several to flinch involuntarily. Isola smiled.

Titanic fields enveloped and deformed a tortured sun, dragging long shreds of its substance towards a spinning,

flattened whirlpool – a disc so bright it searingly outshone the unfortunate nearby star.

“Until now, most investigations of macro black holes have concentrated on showy cases like this one – the

Cygnus A singularity – which raises such ferocious tides on a companion sun as to tear it apart before our eyes. In

galactic cores, greedy mega holes can devour entire stellar clusters. No wonder most prior expeditions were devoted

to viewing noughts with visible accretion discs. Besides, their splashy radiance makes them easy to find.”

Isola watched the victim star’s tattered, stolen essence spiral into the planate cyclone, which brightened painfully

despite attenuation by the viewing software. Shimmering, lambent stalks traced magnetically directed plasma beams,

jetting from the singularity north and south. As refulgent gas swirled inward, jostling and heating, it suddenly reached

an inner lip – the edge of a black circle, tiny in diameter but awesome in conclusiveness. The Event Horizon.

Spilling across that boundary, the actinic matter vanished abruptly, completely. Once over the edge, it was no

longer part of reality. Not this reality, anyway.

Mikaela had begun her lecture from a basic level, since some of the visitors weren’t cosmogonists. One of these,

Jarlquin, the geneticist from Pleasence, shifted on her chaise. At some silent order, a pseudo-life assistant appeared to

massage her shoulders. Petite, even for a starfarer, Jarlquin glanced towards Isola, offering a conspiratorial smile.

Isola pretended not to notice.

“Most massive noughts don’t have stars as close neighbours, 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 macro-singularities 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

micro-singularities …”

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 sub-vocally 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 pico-singularities 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 marvelled 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.

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