For Love and Glory

XIX

Fifty hours of leap, study, leap were unendurably long and unbelievably few. At the end, the travelers met in the saloon. Word like this should be face to face, where hand could seize hand. For it, they gave themselves boost, weight, that they might sit around the table at ease, perhaps the last ease they would ever know.

Esker rose. Pride swelled his stumpy form. “I am ready to tell you what I have found,” he said.

“After the Great Confederacy.” Orichalc murmured the words, but forgot to keep the trans equally quiet. Well, Lissa thought beneath her heart-thumping, Children’s Day morning expectancy, of course all beings want their races given all due honor, whether or not they like the governments.

Esker surprised her with a mild answer: “True. And your people scarcely came upon this by last-minute accident. I imagine a survey ship found it ten or twenty years ago. They—the rulers, that is—saw the potentialities, but bided their time till the climactic moment neared. Humans couldn’t have kept a secret like that.”

Has his triumph made him gentler? wondered Lissa. I’m glad for you, Esker.

“What are the potentialities, then?” Valen demanded.

“I don’t know,” the physicist replied. “Neither do the Susaians, or they wouldn’t be making such an effort.” He paused. Something mystical entered his speech, his whole manner. “An unprecedented event, rare if not totally unique in the universe. Who can say what it will unleash? Quite possibly, phenomena never suspected by us. Conceivably, laws of nature unknown even to the Forerunners.”

And what technologies, what powers might spring from those discoveries? went chill through Lissa. For good or ill, salvation or damnation. I can’t blame the Susaians or the Domination for wanting to keep it to themselves. I wish we humans could.

“Tell us what it is!” she blurted.

The three assistants shifted on their bench. They knew. Their master had laid silence on them. This was to be his moment.

He looked at her and measured out his words. “I can give you the basic fact in a single sentence, milady. Two black holes are on a collision course.”

Orichalc hissed and Valen softly whistled.

Black holes, Lissa evoked from memory. Stars two—or was it three?—or more times greater than Sunniva, ragingly luminous, consuming their cores with nuclear fire until after mere millions of years they exploded as supernovae, briefly rivaling their whole galaxy; then the remnant collapsing, but not into the stability of a neutron star. No, the mass was still huge, gravitation overcame quantum repulsion, shrinkage went on and on toward zero size and infinite density, though to an outside observer it soon slowed almost to a halt and would take all eternity to reach its end point. The force of gravity rose until light itself could not escape. …

She had seen pictures of a few, taken from spacecraft at a distance and by probes venturing closer. No more than that; their kind was surely numbered in the billions, but explorers were still ranging only this one tiny segment of a thinly populated outer fringe of the galaxy.

Wonder and terror enough, just the same. The event horizon, the sphere of ultimate darkness, was asteroid size, sometimes visible as a tiny round blot in heaven, sometimes not. For it captured matter from space, and if there happened to be enough of that nearby, a nebula or, still more so, a companion sun from which the hole sucked mass, then fire wheeled around it, the accretion disc, spiraling ever faster into the maw, giving off a blaze of energy as it fell. The stupendous gravity dragged at light waves, reddened them, twisted their paths. Its tidal pull stretched a probe asunder and whirled the fragments off into the disc.… Most of the knowledge was to Lissa little more than words, quantum tunneling, Hawking radiation, space and time interchangeably distorted. …

I’m not badly informed for a layman, she thought. I remember Professor Artur remarking how much remains unknown to any of the spacefaring races. He felt that in the nature of the case it would always be unknown too, because there is no possible way for information to reach us through the event horizon. But if a pair of them crash together—

“That must be rare indeed,” Orichalc said low.

“Unless at galactic center?” Valen mused.

“Conjecture,” Esker snorted. “Yes, perhaps lesser black holes are among the stars that the Monster engulfs. That might help account for some of the things we have glimpsed there, such as short-lived trails of radiation. They may be from matter that it somehow accelerates almost to light speed, soon slowed down again by interaction with the interstellar medium. We don’t know. I tell you, in spite of all proud pretensions to having a final theory, we don’t know.”

The Monster, Lissa remembered. The truly gigantic black hole at the galactic heart, hidden from sight behind the dust clouds gathered around there, barred from exploration by unloosed energies that would almost instantly kill any organic being and wreck the circuits of any robot.

How did the conventional scientists dare imagine that no fundamental mysteries remained in the universe?

Esker’s voice lifted as if in triumph. “Here such an event is out where we can watch it.”

Again the academic tone took over. “Also, this is not a simple linear collision, such as we believe we have some theoretical understanding of. That would be vanishingly improbable, two singularities aimed straight at each other. This will be a grazing encounter, the convergence of two eccentric galactic orbits.

“From our observation of orbits and accelerations, we’ve obtained the masses of the bodies with considerable accuracy. They are approximately nine and ten Sols. That means the event horizons are about sixty kilometers in diameter. Calculation of closest approach—that involves some frank guesswork. We have good figures for the orbital elements. If these were Newtonian point masses, they’d swing by on hyperbolic paths at a distance of about thirty kilometers and a speed of about one-third light’s. But they aren’t, and it’d be a waste of breath to give you exact figures, when all I’m sure of is that the event horizons will intersect. The ship has programs taking relativistic and quantum effects into account. I’ve used them. However, certain key answers come out as essentially nonsense. The matrices blow up in a mess of infinities. We simply don’t know enough. We shall have to observe.

“Observe,” he whispered. “See.”

“Can we get that near, and live?” Valen asked.

“As near as the Susaians, I daresay.” Now Esker sounded boyishly bold and careless.

“How near is that, do you suppose?”

“Probably closer than humans would venture, if this were their project from the beginning. We’d send in sophisticated robotic vessels. The Susaians will do their best with probes, but that best isn’t very good. No nonhuman race’s is. They all keep trying to copy from us, and never get it right.”

“Every species has its special talents,” Lissa interjected for shame’s sake. She wondered if Orichalc cared, either way.

“Give me a figure, will you?” Valen snapped.

“An estimate,” Esker replied. “To start with, the collision will produce a stupendous gamma burst, detectable across the width of the universe. Nobody and nothing could survive anywhere near that. However, it’s known from theory and remote observation that this doesn’t happen at once. It results from the recollapse of matter hurled outward by the electromagnetic and other forces released in the encounter. The recollapse to critical density takes two or three days. Meanwhile, yes, radiation background and gas temperatures will be high and increasing.

“However, our advanced protective systems can fend off more than most ships. The Susaians must have some that are equally shieldable. Integrating the expected radiation over time around the event, and throwing in a reasonable safety factor, I’d undertake to keep on station at a distance of two hundred million kilometers, for two hundred and fifty hours before the impact and maybe as much as thirty hours after it, depending on what the actual intensities turn out to be. That’s far too deep in the gravity well for a hyperjump escape, of course, but I’d call the odds acceptable.”

He spread his hands. “Granted,” he went on, “the whole reason for the exercise is that nobody can predict what will happen. I make no promises. All I say is, if I were the Susaian in charge, I’d post four live crews at approximately that distance. One each ‘above’ and ‘below’ the point of contact, the other two 180° apart in the impact-orbital plane. I’d put others elsewhere, naturally, but these four should have the best positions, if our theories correspond to any part of reality.

“And if I were that Susaian, I’d join one of those crews.”

Lissa leaned forward. She shivered. “When will the encounter be?” she asked.

“If we jumped now to the vicinity,” Esker told them in carefully academic style, “we would observe it in a little more than eleven standard days.”

“That soon,” Valen murmured into stillness renewed. “We barely made it, didn’t we?”

He shook himself, straightened where he sat, and clipped, “Very well. Thank you, Dr. Harolsson. If you haven’t already, please put your data and conclusions in proper form for transmission. We’ve got to notify headquarters. What we’ve learned thus far mustn’t be lost with us. Besides, I’ll be interested in the exact information, the actual numbers, too.” His smile was crooked. “Personally interested.”

Lissa saw doubt on Elif; Noel swallowed; Tessa laughed aloud. They foreknew. It was Orichalc who said, “Thereafter, do you intend that we shall see the event?”

Valen’s head lifted. “What else? On Asborg, they’d never outfit and scramble another ship in time.”

“Humans won’t get another chance,” Esker agreed, “and I doubt the Susaians will share what they learn.”

Lissa paid him no heed. She caught Valen’s arm. “Yes, certainly,” rang from her. “It’s up to us. That’s how you were bound to think, Gerward.”

The glee drained out of Esker, as if somehow gravity had reached from the lightless masses yonder. Sexual frustration, Lissa thought. We shouldn’t flaunt what we have, that he can’t.