Polaris

PROOLOG
I.

It no longer looked like a sun. When they’d arrived, only a few days ago, Delta Karpis had been a standard class G star, serene, placid, drifting quietly through the great deeps with its family of worlds, as it had done for 6 billion years. Now it was a misshapen bag, dragged through the night by an invisible hand. Its mass seemed to have shriveled beneath the tidal pressures; and a stream of radiant gas, millions of kilometers long, jetted from the neck of the bag, connecting the stricken star with a glowing point.

A point. Chek Boland looked at it a long time, marveling that something so small as to be virtually invisible could be so disruptive, could literally distort a sun.

You haven’t seen anything yet, the astronomers from the other ships were saying. It hasn’t even begun.

He turned his attention to Klassner. “Nine hours left, Marty,” he said.

“Showtime.”

Klassner was sitting in his favorite chair, the gray-green one with the side table, his unfocused eyes fixed on the bulkhead. Gradually he blinked and turned toward Boland. “Yes,” he said. And then: “Showtime for what?”

“The collision.”

He was wearing the puzzled expression that they saw all too often now. “Are we going to hit something?”

“No. The dwarf is about to hit Delta Kay.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is remarkable. I’m glad we came.”

The telescopes revealed the point to be a dull red disk surrounded by a ring of shining gas. It was a white dwarf, the naked core of a collapsed star. Its electrons had been torn from their nuclei and jammed together, producing an object one step short of a black hole. A year ago, it had penetrated the planetary system, scattering worlds and moons, and now it had become a dagger aimed directly at the heart of Delta Karpis itself.

Klassner had been lucid last evening, and they’d been talking about the human tendency to project personality onto inanimate objects. To develop loyalty to a ship.

To think that a childhood home welcomes one back. Now they could not escape a sense of sadness, watching the death struggle of the star, as if it were a living thing, somehow conscious of what was happening to it.

Nancy White had been part of the conversation. Nancy was a popularizer of science and had produced shows watched by millions. She’d commented that it was nonsense, that she couldn’t bring herself to indulge in that particular fantasy when a genuine catastrophe was taking place on the third world, which was home to large animals, living oceans, and vast forests. They called the place Kissoff in sullen reaction. Kissoff had, so far, survived the general turmoil in the system caused by the presence of the interloper. Its orbit had become eccentric, but that was of no moment compared with what was about to happen to it and its biosphere. Within the next few hours, its oceans would boil off, and the atmosphere would be ripped away.

On a different scale, watching the approaching destruction of Martin Klassner was also painful. Klassner had demonstrated, after thousands of years of speculation, that alternate universes did exist. It was the breakthrough everyone had thought impossible. They’re out there, and Klassner had predicted that one day transportation to them would become possible. Now they were called Klassner universes.

Last year he’d come down with Bentwood’s Syndrome, which induced occasional delusions and bouts of memory loss. His long, thin hands trembled constantly. The disease was terminal, and there was doubt whether he’d survive the year. The medical community was working on it, and a cure was coming. But Warren Mendoza, one of two medical researchers on board, insisted it would be too late.

Unless Dunninger’s research held the answer.

“Kage.” Klassner was addressing the AI. “What is its velocity now?” He meant the white dwarf.

“It has increased slightly to six hundred twenty kilometers, Martin. It will accelerate another four percent during its final approach.”

They’d just finished dinner. Impact would take place at 0414 hours ship time.

“I never expected,” said Klassner, turning his gray, watery eyes on Boland, “to see anything like this.” He was back. It was amazing the way he came and went.

“None of us did, Marty.” The frequency of such an event anywhere within the transport lanes had been estimated at one every half billion years. And here it was.

Incredible. “God has been very kind to us.”

Klassner’s breathing was audible. It sounded whispery, harsh, labored. “I would have wished, though, if we were going to have a collision,” he said, “it could have taken place between two real stars.”

“A white dwarf is a real star.”

“No. Not really. It’s a burned-out corpse.” Part of the problem with Bentwood’s was that, along with its other effects, it seemed to reduce intelligence. Klassner’s enormous intellect had at one time glowed in those eyes. You could look at him and literally see his brilliance. There were times now when it seemed he was on automatic, that no one was behind the wheel. It would not have been correct to say that his gaze had turned vacuous, but the genius was gone, save for an occasional glimmer. And he knew it, knew what he had once been. It’s a burned-out corpse.

“I wish we could get closer,” Boland said. The link to the bridge was on, and he intended the comment for Madeleine English, their pilot.

“As far as I’m concerned,” she responded, “we’re already too close.” Her voice was cool and crisp. She wasn’t impressed by the six celebrities who constituted the entire passenger list for the Polaris.

The Sentinel was somewhere above Delta Kay’s north pole; the Rensilaer lay on the far side of the dwarf. Both were filled with working researchers, measuring, counting, recording, gathering data that specialists would still be analyzing years hence. One of the major objectives of the mission was to measure, finally, the natural curve of space-time.

The conversations among the ships had grown increasingly enthusiastic during the buildup. You ever see anything like this? I feel as if everything I’ve done has been leading up to this moment. Look at that son of a bitch. Cal, what are you getting on acceleration? But it had all died away during the last few hours. The comm links were silent, and even Boland’s fellow passengers had little to say.

They’d all gone back to their cabins after dinner, to work, or read, or while away the final hours however they could. But the herd instinct had taken over, and one by one they’d filtered back. Mendoza in white slacks and pullover, always a brooding figure, absorbed to the exclusion of everything else by the drama playing out in the sky. Nancy White, scribbling notes to herself between exchanges with Tom Dunninger, Mendoza’s occasional colleague. They were microbiologists. Dunninger had earned an extraordinary reputation in his chosen field. He’d dedicated the latter years of his career to pursuing a way to stave off the ageing process. And Garth Urquhart, who had for two terms been one of the seven councillors of the Associated States.

On the screens, the torture of Delta Karpis grew more intense. The solar bag was becoming more and more stretched. “Who would have believed,” said Mendoza, “that one of these things could become that distorted without blowing up.”

“It’s coming,” said White.

The hours counted down, and the conversation never wandered from the spectacle. What’s the mass of that thing anyhow? Is it my imagination, or is the sun changing color? The ring around the dwarf is getting brighter.

Shortly before midnight they set up a buffet. They wandered around the table, sampling fruit and cheese. Dunninger opened a bottle of wine and Mendoza offered a toast to the dying giant outside. “Unmarked for six billion years,” he said. “All that time just waiting for us.”

Unlike the researchers in the Sentinel and the Rensilaer, they were no more than casual observers. No work was being done, no measurements taken, no records kept, by any of them. They were there simply to enjoy the show, which consisted of slices of feeds from all three ships and from dozens of probes and satellites. They would sit quietly, or noisily if they preferred, and watch. Survey and the scientific community were saying thanks for their assorted contributions.

The Polaris wasn’t designed as a research vessel. It was a supplemental carrier, a luxury vehicle (by Survey’s spartan standards) that transported VIPs whom the director wanted to impress. Usually, these were political figures. This, however, was a different sort of occasion.

The images of Delta Karpis and the white dwarf on the wall screen were better than anything they could see with the naked eye. Still, Boland, who was a psychiatrist, noticed they all had a tendency to station themselves near the viewports, as if that were the only way to be really present at the event.

Huge explosions erupted periodically from the surface of the sun and vast waves of glowing gas were flung into the darkness of space.

A streak of white light ripped outward from the dwarf. “Looks like a piece broke off,” said Urquhart.

“Not possible,” said Klassner. “Nothing’s going to break off a neutron star and float away. It was gas.”

Boland was the youngest of the passengers. He was probably forty, with black hair, trim good looks and a self-confident demeanor that never failed to turn women’s heads. He had started out doing mind wipes and personality reconstruction for violent criminals, converting them into contented-or at least, law-abiding-citizens. But he was best known for his work in the neurological sciences, and for the Boland Model, which purported to be the most comprehensive explanation ever devised of how the brain worked.

Delta Kay’s remaining worlds moved serenely in their orbits, as if nothing unusual were occurring. Except for the innermost, which had been a gas giant so close to the sun that it literally sailed through its outer atmosphere. That was Delta Karpis I.

It had no other name, and now it was gone, swallowed by a flare. They’d seen it happen. It had plunged in, but only a couple of its moons had emerged on the other side.

When the dwarf arrived, a year ago, Delta Kay had possessed a planetary system containing five gas giants, six terrestrial worlds, and a couple of hundred moons. The outermost was still there, a world of blue crystal and brilliant silver rings, with only three satellites. Boland thought it the loveliest celestial object he’d ever seen.

Kissoff was also still relatively untouched by the disaster. Its oceans remained placid, and its skies were quiet except for a hurricane in one of the southern seas. It was just getting started, but it would not have an opportunity to develop. Most of the other worlds had been dragged from their orbits and were now outbound. Delta Karpis IV had been a double planet, two terrestrial worlds, each with a frozen atmosphere. They’d been ripped apart and were now headed in almost diametrically opposite directions.

The dwarf was smaller than Rimway, smaller even than Earth. But it packed more mass than Delta Kay, and Boland knew that if somehow he could reach the surface of the object, he would weigh billions of tons.

At 2:54 A . M ., the dwarf and its shining ring slipped into the chaos and disappeared.

At 2:54 A . M ., the dwarf and its shining ring slipped into the chaos and disappeared.

Urquhart said he didn’t care what anybody said, something that small couldn’t possibly avoid getting swallowed by the conflagration. Tom Dunninger commented how it could just as easily have been a sun warming one of the Confederate worlds.

“It’s a sobering moment,” he said. “Makes you realize nobody’s safe.”

The comment seemed pointed, and Boland wondered if he was sending a message.

Huge explosions ripped through the stricken sun, and the AI reported that temperatures on its surface were soaring. Its basic yellow-orange hue was fading to white. Wild forest fires had broken out on Kissoff. And enormous clouds of mist were rising out of the oceans. Abruptly, the picture went blank.

“Lost at the source,” said the AI.

Delta Kay V was adrift, sucked in toward the collision. It was normally icecovered, with only a wisp of atmosphere. But the ice had melted, and its sky was full of thick gray clouds. Two of the satellites orbiting the gas giant Delta Kay VII collided. Its rings, brown and gold like a sunset, began to shimmer and break apart.

Maddy’s voice sounded over the link: “The Rensilaer is saying the sun’ll put out as much energy during the next hour as it has over the last hundred million years.”

The Sentinel reported that it was taking more radiation than it had been prepared for and was withdrawing. Its captain told Madeleine, in a transmission mistakenly relayed to the passengers, to be careful. “That’s bad weather out there.”

Madeleine English stayed on the bridge. Usually she did not hesitate to join her passengers in the common room when circumstances allowed, but at the moment conditions demanded she remain in the pilot’s seat. She was a beautiful woman, with blue eyes, lush blonde hair, perfect features. But there was no softness in her, no sense that she was in any way vulnerable.

Mendoza asked whether they were too close.

“We’re at a safe distance,” Maddy said. “Don’t worry. At the first sign of overload, we’ll skedaddle.”

One hour, eight minutes after it had vanished into the inferno, the dwarf reappeared. It had plowed directly through the sun, sailed through, according to the experts on the other ships, like a rock going through fog. The solar stream that had reached out toward it during its approach had collapsed back into the turbulence, and a new one was forming on the opposite side, dragged out of the dying star by the enormous gravity. Then a titanic explosion obscured the view.

“I’m closing the viewports,” said Maddy. “You’ll have to settle for watching the feeds now. If it goes prematurely, we don’t want anyone blinded.” Dunninger napped. And even Mendoza. Nancy White looked tired. She’d tried to get some rest during the day, but it didn’t matter. Circadian rhythms were what they were, and it happened that ship time coincided with Andiquar time, so it really was close to 4:00 A . M . She had taken something to stay awake. Boland didn’t know what it was, but he knew the symptoms.

Boland was startled by the tug of the ship’s engines. Madeleine appeared briefly at the door to report that it was getting “a little bit hot outside,” and she was going to withdraw to a safer distance. “Everybody belt down.”

They secured Mendoza and Dunninger without waking them. And then Boland settled into his own harness.

Incredibly, it didn’t seem as if the dwarf had even slowed down. It was still dragging the entrails of the sun behind it. The scene reminded Boland of a cosmic taffy pull.

The senior expert on stellar collisions was on the Sentinel. He’d predicted that the sun would collapse during the course of the event. Final demolition would occur, he said, when the various forces generated by the passage of the dwarf had time to penetrate the outer layers. Delta Karpis was more massive than their home sun by about a quarter, more massive than Sol by a third.

Maddy piped in the voice of one of the experts from the Rensilaer: “Any minute now.”

They woke Mendoza and Dunninger.

“It’s starting to go,” said Klassner. “What you’ll see first is a general collapse.”

Moments later, that character-switch came over him, and he was someone else. He looked first puzzled, then sleepy. Boland watched his eyelids sag. Within minutes, Klassner was asleep.

What they saw first was a bright white light that blew all the pictures off the monitors. Somebody inhaled, but no one spoke. Mendoza, seated beside Klassner, looked toward Boland, and their eyes locked. Boland knew Mendoza well. They’d been friends a long time, but something deeper passed between them in that moment, as if they were comrades standing on a dark shore.

They jumped out past the orbit of the fifth planet, to a prearranged location, where they rejoined the other ships. Klassner woke during the jump and looked devastated when they told him it was over. “You slept through it, Marty,” said Mendoza. “We tried to wake you, but you were seriously out.”

“It’s okay,” White told him. “You’ll get another chance.” From this range, the explosion hadn’t occurred yet, was still forty minutes away, and the researchers were able to set up and wait for the event to happen again. Klassner swallowed his disappointment, and commented that his daughter wouldn’t be a bit surprised when he told her what had happened. Boland understood that Klassner had no children.

From their present range, Delta Karpis would normally have been a relatively small disk. But the disk was gone, replaced by a yellow smear twisted into the shape of a pear.

Nancy White was sitting with a notebook, recording her impressions, as if she would one day publish them. Her reputation had come from creating and moderating a series of shows, Nancy White’s Fireside Chats, in which she talked science and philosophy with her audience; and Time-Out, a panel discussion that allowed her to sit each week with simulated historical figures ranging from Hammurabi to Adrian Cutter to Myra Kildare to discuss the issues of the day. The show had never been enormously popular, but-as the producers liked to say-the people who counted loved it.

Urquhart talked quietly with Mendoza. Dunninger had opened a book but wasn’t really paying any attention to it.

They counted down, and it all happened again. Except at this range it was less painful to watch. The pear buckled, and the light coming through the viewports alternately brightened and darkened. And finally subsided into a hostile red glow.

It was odd, living through an event twice. But that was what FTL did for you.

When you could outrun light, you could travel in time.

Within two hours, Delta Karpis was gone, and the light in the solar system had gone out. Only a blaze of luminous gas, and the bright golden ring around the dwarf, remained. They watched while the neutron star proceeded quietly on its way.