Calculating God

30

What do you do in the last moments of your life? Unlike most of the six billion humans who had just received a death sentence, I actually had been preparing for my own demise. But I’d expected it to come at a more dilatory pace, with me in a hospital bed, accompanied by Susan, maybe my brother Bill, a few friends, and perhaps even brave little Ricky.

But the explosion of Betelgeuse was utterly unheralded; we didn’t see it coming. Oh, as Hollus had said earlier, we knew Betelgeuse would doubtless eventually go supernova, but there was no reason to expect it to happen right now.

Toronto’s subway system was jammed already, according to the radio reports. People were going down into the stations, into the subway cars, hoping that they would be protected by being underground. They were refusing to vacate the trains, even at the ends of the lines.

And the roads outside the ROM had already turned into parking lots, total gridlock. I wanted to be with family just as much as everyone else did, but there didn’t seem to be any way to manage it. I tried repeatedly calling Susan’s office, but all I got were busy signals.

Of course, death wouldn’t be instantaneous. There would be weeks, or even months, before the ecosystem collapsed. Right now, Earth’s ozone layer was protecting us from the high-energy photons, and, of course, the sleet of bulky charged particles, traveling slower than the speed of light, hadn’t arrived yet. But soon enough the onslaught from Betelgeuse would strip off the ozone layer, and hard radiation both from that exploding star and from our own sun would reach the ground, breaking down living tissue. Surely I would be able to reunite with my wife and son before the end. But for now, it seemed, my company would be the simulacrum of an alien being.

The first blast from Betelgeuse had already disrupted the satellite-based long-distance telephone network, and so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the avatar wink in and out of existence periodically, as the electromagnetic cacophony from Orion interfered with the communication between the real Hollus over Ecuador and her holographic stand-in here in Toronto.

“I wish I could be with Susan,” I said, looking at the Forhilnor across my desk, cluttered with unfinished business.

To my astonishment, Hollus actually raised her voices — something I’d never heard her do before. “At least you will likely get to see your family before the end. You think you are far from home? I cannot even contact my children. If Betelgeuse is hitting Earth with this sort of force, it will slam Beta Hydri III, as well. I cannot even radio a goodbye to Kassold and Pealdon; not only is there too much interference, but the radio signal would not reach them for twenty-four years.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“No, you were not,” she snapped again, holographic spittle actually flying from her left mouth. But after a moment, she calmed down a little. “Apologies,” she said. “It is just that I love my children so much. To know that they — that my entire race — is dying . . .”

I looked at my friend. She’d been away from her world for so long already — out of touch with what was going on back home for years now. Her son and daughter were grown when she left on her grand tour of eight star systems, but now — now, they were likely middle aged, perhaps even biologically older than Hollus herself was, for she had traveled at relativistic speeds during much of her journey.

It was worse than that, actually, come to think of it. Betelgeuse was in Earth’s northern sky; Beta Hydri in its southern one — which meant that Earth was between the two stars. It would be several years before the brightening of Betelgeuse would be visible from Beta Hydri III — but there was no way to get a warning to that world; nothing could reach it faster than the angry photons from Betelgeuse that were already on their way.

Hollus was visibly trying to regain her composure. “Come,” she said at last, her torso bobbing slowly, deliberately. “We might as well go outside and look at the spectacle.”

And we did, taking the elevator down and exiting through the staff entrance. We stood outdoors on the same patch of concrete that Hollus’s shuttle had originally landed on.

For all I knew, the Forhilnor and her colleagues were indeed positioning their starship for maximum safety. But the simulacrum of her stood with me, out front of the ROM, in the shadow of the abandoned planetarium dome, staring up. Even most of the passersby were looking up at the cerulean bowl rather than at the weird, spiderlike alien.

Betelgeuse was clearly visible as we looked out over the street toward Queen’s Park; it was about a third of the way up the southeastern sky. It was disquieting to see a star shining during daylight. I tried to imagine the rest of Orion’s splayed form against the blue backdrop but had no idea how it would be oriented at this time of day.

Other staff members and patrons exited the museum, as well, joining the gathering crowd on the side of the road. And, after a few minutes, astronomer Donald Chen, the walking dead, came out of the staff entrance and headed over to join us, more of the walking dead.

The Hubble Space Telescope had, of course, been immediately trained on Betelgeuse. Much better pictures were being obtained by Hollus’s starship, the Merelcas, and these were broadcast down to be freely shared with the people of Earth. Even before the star had started to expand, the mothership’s telescopes had been able to resolve Betelgeuse into a red disk marred by cooler sun spots and speckled with hotter convective patches, all surrounded by a magnificent ruddy corona.

But now that diaphanous outer atmosphere had been blown off in a phenomenal explosion, and the star itself was expanding rapidly, swelling to many times its normal diameter — although since Betelgeuse was a variable star, it was hard to say precisely what its normal diameter was. But, still, it had never before reached anywhere near these proportions. A yellow-white shell of superheated gas, a lethal plasma, was expanding outward from the spreading disk, hurtling in all directions.

From the ground, in the light of day, all we could see was a bright point of light, flaring and flickering.

But the starship’s telescopes showed more.

Much more.

Incredibly more.

Through them, one could see another explosion rocking the star — it actually shifted slightly in the telescopes’ fields of view — and more plasma spewing into space.

And then what appeared to be a small vertical rip — jagged-edged, its sides limned with piercing blue-white energy — opened up a short distance to the right of the star. The rip grew longer, more jagged, and then —

— and then a substance darker than space itself started to pour through the rip, flowing out of it. It was viscous, almost as if tar were oozing through from the other side, but . . .

But, of course, there was no “other side” — no way a hole could appear in the wall of the universe, my fantasy about grabbing hold of space itself and peeling it aside like a tent flap notwithstanding. The universe, by definition, was self-contained. If the blackness wasn’t coming from outside, then the rip must be a tunnel, a wormhole, a join, a warp, a stargate, a shortcut — something connecting two points in the cosmos.

The black mass continued to flow out. It had definite edges; stars winked into invisibility as its perimeter passed over them. Assuming it really was near Betelgeuse, it must have been huge; the rip would have been more than a hundred million kilometers in length, and the object pouring out of it several times that in diameter. Of course, since the thing was utterly, overwhelmingly black, neither radiating nor reflecting any light, it had no spectrum to analyze for Doppler shifts, and there would be no easy way to do a parallactic study to determine the object’s distance.

Shortly, the entire mass had passed out of the rip. It had a palmate structure — a central blob with six distinct appendages. No sooner was it free than the rift in space closed up and disappeared.

Dying Betelgeuse was contracting again, falling in upon itself. What had happened so far, said Donald Chen, was just the preamble. When the infalling gas hit the iron core for a second time, the star would really blow up, flaring so brightly that even we — four hundred light-years distant shouldn’t look directly at it.

The black object was moving through the firmament by rolling like a spiked wheel, as if — it couldn’t be; no, it couldn’t — as if its six extensions were somehow gaining purchase on the very fabric of space. The object was moving toward the contracting disk of Betelgeuse. The perspective was tricky to work out — it wasn’t until one of the limbs of the blackness touched, then covered, the edge of the disk that it became clear that the object was at least slightly closer to Earth than Betelgeuse was.

As the star continued to collapse behind it, the blackness further interposed itself between here and there, until in short order it had completely eclipsed Betelgeuse. From the ground, all we could see was that the superbright star had disappeared; Sol no longer had a rival in the daytime sky. Through the Merelcas’s telescopes, though, the black form was clearly visible, a multiarmed inkblot against the background dusting of stars. And then —

And then Betelgeuse must have done as Chen said it would, exploding behind the blackness, with more energy than a hundred million suns. As seen from worlds on the opposite side, the great star must have flared enormously, an eruption of blinding light and searing heat, accompanied by screams of radio noise. But from Earth’s perspective —

From Earth’s perspective, all that was hidden. Still, the inkblot seemed to surge forward, toward the telescopes’ eyes, as if it had been punched from behind, its central blob expanding to fill more of the field of view as it was hurtled closer. The six arms, meanwhile, were blown backward, like the tentacles of a jet-propelled squid seen head on.

Whatever this object was, it bore the brunt of the explosion, shielding Earth — and presumably the Forhilnor and Wreed homeworlds, too — from the onslaught that otherwise would have destroyed each world’s ozone layer.

Standing outside the ROM, we didn’t know what had happened — not yet, not then. But slowly realization dawned, even if the supernova didn’t. The three homeworlds were going to be spared, somehow.

Life would go on. Incredibly, thankfully, miraculously, life would go on.

At least for some.