For Love and Glory

XXI

Jump.

At one light-hour, the incandescence around the black holes made them even brighter than the giant star. You could have read by that livid radiance. Their closeness was deceptive; Dagmar had emerged well off any normal to their paths. Yet even as Lissa watched, her unaided eyes saw them creep nearer. Chill went through her, marrow-deep. Second by second, those colossal accelerations were mounting.

And what when they met? Esker believed the masses would fuse. If nothing else could leave such a gravity well, how could the thing itself? But this was no simple, head-on crash, it would be a grazing blow. He said the case had been considered theoretically, centuries ago, but not as fully as it might have been, and had since lain obscure—probably in the archives of other races too—for nobody awaited it in reality. He spoke of problems with linear and angular momentum, potential fields, quantum tunneling by photons, leptons, baryons, gravitons. The event horizons should undergo convulsive changes of shape. Still more should the static limits, below which everything from outside was ineluctably hauled into orbit in the same sense as a black hole’s rotation. This pair had opposite spins with distinct orientations. What wavelike distortions might their meeting send out through the continuum? Already, space-time around each was warped. In a black hole’s own frame, the collapse to singularity was swift. To a safely distant observer, it took forever; what she saw was not a completed being but an eternal becoming. Yet if somehow the inside of it should be bared, however briefly, to her universe, there was no way even to guess what would follow.

“Emissions from spacecraft powerplant detected,” said Dagmar. “I estimate the nearest at fifteen million kilometers.”

No surprise, here. Nevertheless Lissa knew guiltily that for a pulsebeat she had let her attention stray from her guns. Valen remained cool: “Any indications that they’ve noticed us?”

“None. They may well fail to. The background is high because of emissions from the search objects, and the Susaians have no reason to be watchful for new arrivals.”

“Uh-huh. Hard to see how they can think about anything but… that.”

Lissa allowed herself a magnified view. The optics must adjust brightness pixel by pixel before she could see any detail against the glare at either forefront. The comet tails had fused, while changeable light seethed in a ring around each flattened fire-globe. She thought she could make out fountains and geysers within it, brief saw-teeth on the rims. Dopplering shaded it clearly toward violet on the one edge, red on the other, a whirling rainbow.

“Emissions indeed!” Esker shouted. “What readings!”

Nothing dangerous to ship or crew. This puny radius, which would not have touched the Oort cloud of a typical planetary system, was still beyond mortal comprehension. You could give it a name and hang numbers on it; that was all.

“Yes, event horizons distinctly deformed,” Esker crooned.

Lissa knew that his instruments saw what she could not. The sight before her, like every such earlier, must in at least some part be illusion. Gravity sucked matter in from every direction, while its colliding atoms gave off radiation that grew the more furious the deeper it fell; but as it neared the static limit, bent space-time compelled it into the maelstrom. Yonder comas were no more than its last clotting and sparking before it entered the accretion disc; the ring was no more than the verge of an inward-rushing cataract. Esker’s devices looked past them, through the ergosphere, to the ultimate blindness itself. And they had not the eyes of gods wherewith to do this. They took spectra, traced particles, measured mutable fields; from what they gathered, computers drew long mathematical chains of inference.

That process would not end for years, perhaps not for rejuvenations. The readouts and graphics that Esker saw flash before him were the barest preliminary theorizing. They might be dead wrong. It was a powerful mind that could, regardless, immediately grasp something of what went on.

Time went timelessly past, but in retrospect astonishingly short, until he said, “We’re clear to move on, Captain.”

Praise him, Lissa thought. He needs it. He’s earned it. “Fast work,” she chimed in.

His laugh rattled. “Oh, we could spend weeks here and not exhaust the material. But we haven’t got them.”

No, she thought, we now have days to reap a share of the harvest for which the Susaians spent years or decades preparing.

“Right,” Valen agreed. “I take it you want to go on to your next planned point?” Same distance, but directly confronting the impact to be.

“No. I’ve changed my mind, on the basis of what I’ve learned in the last few stops. The latest input seems to confirm my ideas. We’re going straight in.”

“What? Immediately? You know we’re close to the boundary for hyperjump, given masses like those.”

Once inside it, we run strictly on plasma drive, till we’ve gotten remote enough again, Lissa knew. We’re committed.

“Yes, yes, yes.” Lissa heard how Esker barely controlled his temper. “But you know, or should, contact will take place in a hundred and seventy-six hours. I want to be at the two hundred million kilometer radius I calculated was safe, before that happens, in time to set up experiments I’ve devised. How fast can you get us there, ship?”

“At one gravity acceleration, with turnover, considering our present velocity, that will require eighty-eight hours, plus maneuvering time,” Dagmar told him.

Lissa visualized him shaking fists in air. “You can boost higher than that. A lot higher! We’ve got medications against excess weight. We could even go into the flotation tank.”

“Such a delta vee would seriously deplete our reserve. Does the captain order it?”

“No,” Valen decided at once. “One gee it is. You can still observe as we go, Harolsson.”

“But—” The physicist gasped in a breath. “Can’t you understand? We’ve got to be close in, and prepared, for the main event. I expect fluctuations in the metric, short-lived superparticles, polarized gravitons, superstrings— Aargh! Time’s grown so scant as is. If you hadn’t farted it away, everywhere else in space—”

“Most of what we lost was because the people you chose turned out to require training,” Valen interrupted stiffly. “Prudence demands we don’t squander so much mass that we can’t get onto emergency trajectories.”

“Yes, you’ll keep your hide safe, won’t you, whatever else may be sacrificed?”

“That will do. If your considered judgment as a scientist is that we should head directly inward, I assume you don’t want to dawdle here arguing. Give the ship the coordinates you have in mind. Crew, stand by for boost at one gravity.”