Timelike Infinity

Chapter 9

The Friend of Wigner, Jaar, was waiting for Michael Poole at the entrance to the Crab’s grounded boat.

Poole stood on the boat’s exit ramp, bathed in eerie Jovian light. He looked out at the waiting young man, the scatter of Xeelee construction-material buildings in the distance, the glimpses of ancient stones — and over it all the looming, perfect curve of Jupiter.

He felt too old for this.

He’d got through the events of the previous day — the landing, the encounter with Miriam, the bombardment of strangeness — on a kind of psychic momentum. But the momentum had gone now; he’d emerged only reluctantly from a troubled sleep to face the dangers, the pressures of the day, the need to find a way to deal with Miriam’s presence here.

Miriam had spent the sleeping period in the boat. Harry had had the decency to abandon his rights-for-AIs rhetoric for a few hours and had gone into stasis to leave them alone. But Miriam and Michael hadn’t slept together. What were they, kids? They had talked, and held each other’s hands, and finally stumbled to separate bunks. Somehow an acquiescence to lust didn’t seem the right reaction to a century of separation, the renewal of an antique, and combative, relationship.

He wished he hadn’t let Harry talk him into this jaunt. He would have exchanged all he had seen and learned to return to the calmness of his station in the Oort Cloud, his slow tinkering at the fringes of exotic-matter physics.

Of course if he got his head cleaned out, as Harry had done, he’d be able to face all this with a fresh eye.

Well, the hell with that.

Poole walked down the ramp and onto the tough English grass. The Wigner’s Friend smiled at him; Poole saw a young man, tall and whiplash thin, dressed in the standard-issue pink coverall. Bony wrists and ankles protruded from the coarse material. Under a high, cleanshaven dome of a scalp he shared the pallid, hothouse complexion of Shira, and his eyes were watery-brown. Jaar’s stance was a little awkward. Poole guessed that even fifteen centuries hence someone of this height and build would spend his life ducking to avoid looking clumsy, but there was something beyond that, something about the way the Friend’s legs looked bowed -

Rickets. Was it possible that such a curse had been allowed to return to the Earth? Poole’s heart moved.

"You are Michael Poole. I am honored to meet you."

"And you’re Jaar — the guide Shira promised?"

"I am a physical sciences specialist. I trust you slept peacefully."

"Not very." Poole grinned. "I have too many questions."

Jaar nodded with the solemnity of the young. "You have a fine mind, Mr. Poole; it is natural for you to question—"

"And," Poole went on sharply, "Shira said she’d send someone who could provide answers."

Jaar smiled obscurely, and in that expression Poole recognized something of the abstractedness of Shira. Jaar seemed disengaged, uninterested in this little duel, or indeed in any form of interpersonal contact. It was as if he had much more important things weighing on his mind.

"Shira did say that there was little purpose trying to hide from you anything whose existence you had already deduced."

"So you’ve been sent along to humor an old man?"

"No one sent me, Mr. Poole," Jaar said. "I volunteered for the honor."

"It’s me who’s honored, Jaar."

With a little bow Jaar invited Poole to walk with him; side by side, they strolled across the pink-stained grass toward the heart of the earth-craft.

Poole said, "You’re only the second Friend I’ve met… and yet you seem very similar, in disposition, to Shira. Forgive my rudeness, Jaar, but are all you Friends so alike?"

"I don’t think so, Mr. Poole."

"Call me Michael. But you have an inner calm, a strange certainty — even after running the gauntlet of the Qax Navy; even after falling willy-nilly through a hole in spacetime…"

"I am sure that what we have come here to do is right."

Poole nodded. "Your Project. But you’re not allowed to tell me what that is."

"I’m something of a scientist myself; like you, I was born with the curse of an inquiring mind. It must be infuriating to have an area of knowledge blocked from you like this… I apologize." Jaar’s smile was smooth, bland, unyielding; his bald head seemed oddly egglike to Poole, seamless and lacking information. "But you must not think we are all alike, Michael. The Friends are from very different backgrounds, disparate circumstances. Granted we were selected for this mission on the grounds of youth and physical fitness, so we share those characteristics; but perhaps we seem similar to you simply because we are from such a removed reference frame. Perhaps the differences between us are diminished by our distance from you."

"Perhaps," Poole said, and he laughed. "But I’m not naive, lad."

"I’m sure that’s so," Jaar said smoothly. "And yet, without AS technology, none of us shares your two hundred years, Mr… Michael." For a precious second he sounded almost mischievous. "Perhaps you simply aren’t used to the company of young people."

Poole opened his mouth… then closed it again, feeling vaguely embarrassed. "Maybe you’re right." he said.

They walked silently for a while.

An inner calm, a strange certainty… Poole wondered if the mysterious purpose of this mission could have some mystical, or religious, content; perhaps it wasn’t the scientific or engineering project he had first assumed. He had a sudden bizarre image of the battered stones of the henge being aligned with a sunrise over the cloudy limb of Jupiter…

There were certainly elements of a religious devotion among these strange young people. Their blanked-out demeanor, their lack of hope for themselves, he thought. Yes, that was the key to it. Somehow they had no dreams of personal gain, or happiness, in all this. Perhaps the mission plan called for them to sacrifice their lives, Poole wondered; and now he imagined the fragile earth-craft, its mission over, plunging into the forbidding depths of the Jovian atmosphere, ancient menhirs tumbling away like matchsticks.

But what religious sect would style itself the Friends of Wigner?

They reached the "village" that surrounded the ancient henge at the heart of the earth-craft. Jaar led Poole past cones, cylinders, and cubes, all a few feet above head height and composed of the dove-gray Xeelee substance, and scattered in rough rows over the grass. Save for the doorways cut into the buildings it was, thought Poole, like wandering through the play pit of some monstrous child. Knots of young people moved about their tasks calmly and unhurriedly; some of them bore the flat, compact computing devices Berg had called "slates."

They reached a hemispherical hut, anonymous among the rest. "What’s this?" Poole asked. "Home, sweet home? No offense, but I ate enough seaweed with Shira yesterday—"

Jaar laughed, not unpleasantly. "No, Michael; though I would be honored if you would be my guest in my quarters later. This building is for access."

"Access?"

"To the interior of the earth-craft. To the plane of singularities." Jaar studied him, seeming puzzled. "That’s what you wanted to see, wasn’t it?"

Poole smiled. "What are we waiting for?"

They stepped into the dome, Jaar ducking to bring his head under the razor-sharp lintel. Poole felt light on his feet here, almost buoyant; the surface gravity must be a little less than outside. Inside the dome was a slim cylinder that sat on a floor of Xeelee material. A doorway was cut into the cylinder.

Jaar climbed into the cylinder, hunching his thin shoulders; Poole followed. Silently a panel slid over the entrance, sealing them in. The cylinder was cramped, seamless. There was a diffuse, pearly light, but Poole could find no source; it was a little like being inside a neon tube, he thought.

Poole was aware of Jaar studying him with a kind of amused patience. Now Jaar smiled. "This is an elevator. The terminology hasn’t changed since your day. It will take us into the interior."

Poole nodded, feeling oddly nervous; he wasn’t exactly used to exposing himself to the possibility of physical danger. "Right. So we’re over an elevator shaft, cut through the plane of singularities. Hence the reduced gravity."

Jaar seemed to respond to his nervousness. "If you’re not ready—"

"You don’t have to coddle me along, Jaar."

"All right." Jaar touched a section of blank wall. He did not try to hide what he was doing from Poole, even though he must have been aware that Poole would memorize every moment of this trip.

There was no noise. But the floor seemed to fall away. Poole’s stomach lurched and, without intending to, he reached behind himself for the stability of the wall.

Jaar murmured, "It will pass."

Now, as Poole floated, a band of pressure passed up the length of his body: but it was an inverse, negative pressure, like the pressures of exotic matter, which pulled his stomach and chest outward rather than compress them.

Jaar still watched him steadily with his blank brown eyes. Poole kept his face carefully blank. Damn it, he should have been prepared for this; as Jaar had said he’d deduced the structure of the interior of the craft already. "The plane of singularities," he said, his voice reasonably steady. "We’re passing through it. Right?"

Jaar nodded approvingly. "And the pressure you feel about your chest is the gravitational attraction of the singularities. When you stand on the surface of the earth-craft the plane is below you and draws you down, so simulating the gravitational field of the Earth; but here in the interior of the craft the plane is all around us."

The sharp gravitational plane had reached Poole’s neck now; absurdly he found himself raising his head, as if trying to keep his head above a gravitational sea.

Jaar said, "Now, Michael — be ready. You may want to anchor yourself to the walls, as before."

"This time I’ve worked it out. We’re going to tip over. Right?"

"Be ready."

Now the plane passed over Poole’s head and away from him. For a few seconds there was a disconcerting feeling of falling upward that rapidly translated, as Poole’s sensorium went through a hundred-eighty-degree swivel, to a sense of plummeting headfirst downward. Then came rotation, the sharp pull of Coriolis forces at his belly. The elevator cage was turning about an axis somewhere near his waist. Oddly enough Poole did not feel threatened now; it was like being a small child again, like swinging through the air in the strong, safe arms of Harry. The real Harry.

The turn was completed. The sideways Coriolis died away; with a sigh of relief Poole felt himself settle to a normal-feeling floor. Not quite normal; he felt his ears pop. Jaar smiled kindly at him. "Don’t worry," he said. "It took me a while to get used to it."

Poole frowned, feeling an absurd need to demonstrate his manhood to this young man. "I’ve told you, you don’t need to coddle me. We’ve passed through the plane; now we’ve turned upside down, so the holes are beneath our feet again, and everything feels normal. Right?"

Jaar nodded, in unmoved assent. He palmed another section of the wall and the elevator door panel slid aside.

Jaar stepped out onto a clear, glassy surface. Poole followed, almost stumbling; in the gentle gravity the clear surface was as slippery as hell. When he was steady on his feet, Poole raised his head.

The earth-craft was hollow.

Poole was at the center of an artificial cave that looked as if it occupied most of the craft’s bulk. Above his head there was a dome of Xeelee dove-gray, about twenty yards tall at its highest point, and below him a sheet of glass that met the dome at a seamless horizon. Beneath the glass was a hexagonal array of blue and pink bars, each cell in the array about a yard wide.

Tubes of glass — hollow shafts, each a yard wide — rained from the roof, terminating six feet above the floor. It made the dome look like some huge, absurd chandelier, Poole thought. A blocky control console was fixed to the floor beneath each tube. Through the holes in the roof Poole could see patches of Jovian cloud-pink. The shafts looked like fairy-land cannon, pointing at Jupiter.

People — young men and women in pink jumpsuits, Wigner’s Friends — moved about the clear surface, talking and carrying the ubiquitous AI slates; the huge, sparkling pillars dangled unnoticed above their heads like trapped sunlight. The Friends moved with the mercury-slow grace Poole associated with inhabitants of low-gravity worlds like Luna. Their voices, low and serious, carried clearly to Poole, and it was as if he were inside some huge building — perhaps a travel terminus.

The diffuse light seemed to come from the domed ceiling itself, with a little blue-pink toning from the array beneath the floor. It was like being inside a huge lightbulb. Or, perhaps, in the imaginary caverns inside the Earth conjured up by one of Poole’s favorite authors, the ancient Verne.

Jaar smiled and bowed slightly. "So," he said, "the guided tour. Over your head we have a dome of Xeelee construction material. In fact the construction material passes under the floor we stand on and under the singularity plane, forming a shell within the craft broken only by the access shafts."

"Why?"

Jaar shrugged. "Construction material is impervious to all known radiation."

"So it protects the passengers from riding so close to the black holes."

"And it prevented the Qax from detecting our activity and becoming overly suspicious. Yes. In addition, our hyperdrive engine has been incorporated into the fabric of the construction-material shell."

"How did you build the Xeelee shell?"

Jaar rubbed his nose. "You don’t ‘build’ construction material. You grow it. It took humans centuries to work out how, from the first discovery of abandoned Xeelee flowers."

Poole pointed to the floor. "And under here, the plane of singularities."

Jaar dropped to one knee; Poole joined him, and they peered through the floor at the enigmatic spokes of blue and pink-violet. Jaar said, "This surface is not a simple transparent sheet; it is semisentient. What you see here is largely a false-color rendering.

"You have deduced, from your observations of the dimpled gravity field on the surface, that our craft is held together by mini-black hole singularities." He pointed to a node in the hexagonal array. "There is one of them. We manufactured and brought about a thousand of the holes with us through time, Michael."

The holes, the Friend explained, were charged, and were held in place by an electromagnetic lattice. The false colors showed plasma flux lines in the lattice, and high-frequency radiation from infalling matter crushed by the singularities.

Hawking evaporation caused each singularity to glow at a temperature measured in teradegrees. The megawatts generated by the captive, evaporating holes provided the earth-craft’s power — power for the hyperdrive, for example.

The evaporation was whittling away at the mass-energy of each hole, inexorably. But it would take a billion years for the holes to evaporate completely.

Poole peered at the gaudy display somberly; it was difficult to believe that only a few feet beneath him was an object smaller than an electron but with the mass of a city block, a pinpoint flaw in the structure of spacetime itself. And below that was a plane of grass from which clung, like flies to a ceiling, the Crab’s boat; Berg, Shira, and the rest; the toylike buildings of the Friends of Wigner; and — oddest of all — the ancient stones of the henge, dangling there in Jupiter’s light like a rocky chandelier — or perhaps like rotting teeth in the upper jaw of an incomplete, furred-over skull.

There must be a layer of air all the way around this craft, he thought. Of course the air must get pretty thin away from the high-gravity regions, close to the center of the plane of singularities.

Stiffly, he climbed to his feet. "I’m grateful for what you’ve shown me," he said.

Jaar studied him, tall, very bald, disturbingly pale. "And what do you feel you have learned?"

Poole shrugged, deliberately casual. With a wave of his hand he indicated the cavern. "Nothing new. All this is impressive, but it’s just detail. The singularity array. There is the meat of the mission; there’s what you’ve gone to all this trouble to bring back through time." He pointed to the shafts that led to the rents in the construction-material dome. "Those things look like cannon barrels, pointing at Jupiter. I think they are cannon — singularity cannons. I think that one by one you’re going to release these singularities from their electromagnetic nets and propel them out of those tubes and toward Jupiter."

Jaar nodded slowly. "And then what will we do?"

Poole spread his hands. "Simply wait…"

He pictured a singularity — a tiny, all but invisible, fierce little knot of gamma radiation — swooping in great, slow ellipses around Jupiter, on each orbit blasting a narrow channel through the thin gases at the roof of the atmosphere. There would be a great deal of drag; plasma bow waves would haul at the singularity as it plunged through the air.

Eventually, like grasping hands, the atmosphere would claim the singularity.

Rapidly spiraling inward, the hole would scythe through Jupiter’s layers of methane and hydrogen, at last plunging into the core of metallic hydrogen. It would come to rest, somewhere close to Jupiter’s gravitational center. And it would start to grow.

"You’ll send in more and more," Poole said. "Soon there will be a swarm of singularities, orbiting each other like insects inside the solid heart of the planet. And all growing inexorably, absorbing more and more of Jupiter’s substance. Eventually some of the holes will collide and merge, I guess, sending out gravitational waves that will disrupt the outer layers of the planet even more." Maybe, Poole speculated, the Friends could even control the merging of the holes — direct the pulsed gravity waves to sculpt the collapse of the planet.

Eventually, like a cancer, the holes would destroy Jupiter.

As the core was consumed the structure would implode, like a failing balloon; Poole guessed the planet would heat up and there would be pockets of disruption and instability — explosions that would blast away much of the substance of the atmosphere. Tidal effects would scatter the moons, or send them into elliptical orbits; obviously the human inhabitants of the region would have to evacuate. Maybe some of the moons would even be destroyed, by tidal stresses and gravitational waves.

"At last," Poole said, "there will be a single, massive singularity. There will be a wide accretion disk composed of what’s left of the Jovian atmosphere and bits of smashed satellites; and the rest of the moons will loop around the debris like lost birds."

Jaar’s silence was as bland as Xeelee construction material.

Poole frowned. "Of course a single singularity would be enough to collapse Jupiter, if that’s all you want to do. So why have you brought this great flock of the things?"

"No doubt you’ve figured that out too," Jaar said dryly.

"Indeed. I think you’re trying to control the size of the final singularity," Poole said. "Aren’t you? The multiple ‘seed’ singularities will cause the loss of a fraction of the mass of the planet… I think you’ve designed this implosion to result in a final hole of a certain size and mass."

"Why should we do that?"

"I’m still working on that," Poole said grimly. "But the time scales… This could take centuries. I understand a great deal, Jaar, but I don’t understand how you can think in those terms, without AS."

"A man may plan for events beyond his own lifetime," Jaar said, young and certain.

"Maybe. But what happens when you’ve shot off the last of your singularities? The earth-craft is going to break up. Even if the inner shell of construction material keeps its integrity, the exterior — the soil, the grass, the very air — is going to drift away as the source of your gravity field is shot away into space."

He imagined the menhirs lifting from the grass like the limbs of giants, sailing off into Jovian space; it would be a strange end for the ancient henge, far stranger than could have been imagined by those who had carved the stones.

"And what will become of you? You seem determined to refuse any help from us. You must die… perhaps within a few months from now. And certainly long before you see your Project come to fruition, with the collapse of Jupiter."

Jaar’s face was calm, smooth, characterless. "We will not be the first to sacrifice our lives for a greater good."

"And the repulse of the Qax is a greater good? Perhaps it is. But—" Poole stared into the Friend’s wide brown eyes. "But I don’t think a noble self-sacrifice is all that’s happening here. Is it, Jaar? You show no interest in our offers of AS technology. And you could be evacuated before the end. There isn’t really any need for your sacrifice, is there? But you don’t fear death at all. Death is simply… irrelevant."

Jaar did not reply.

Poole took a step back. "You people frighten me," he said frankly. "And you anger me. You rip Stonehenge out of the ground. Stonehenge, for Christ’s sake! Then you have the audacity to come back in time and start the destruction of a planet… the gravitational collapse of most of the System’s usable mass. Jaar, I’m not afraid to face the consequences of my own actions. After all I was the man who built the time machine that brought you here. But I don’t understand how you have the audacity to do this, Jaar — to use up, destroy, so much of humanity’s common heritage."

"Michael, you must not grow agitated over this. I’m sure Shira told you the same thing. In the end, none of this" — he indicated the cavern—"none of us — will matter. Everything will be made good. You know we’re not prepared to tell you any more than you’ve figured out already. But you must not be concerned, Michael. What we are doing is for the benefit of all mankind — to come, and in the past…"

Poole thrust his face into the young man’s. "How dare you make such claims, lay such plans?" he hissed. "Damn it, man, you can’t be more than twenty-five years old. The Qax are a terrible burden for mankind. I’ve seen and heard enough to be convinced of that. But I suspect your Project is more, is bigger, is vaster than any threat posed by a simple oppressor like the Qax. Jaar, I think you are trying to change history. But you are no God! I think you may be more dangerous than the Qax."

Jaar flinched briefly from Poole’s anger, but soon the bland assurance returned.

Poole kept the boy in the cavern for some time, arguing, demanding, threatening. But he learned nothing new.

At last he allowed Jaar to return him to the outer surface. On the way up Poole tried to work the elevator controls, as he’d watched the Friend do earlier. Jaar didn’t stop him. Of course, the controls did not respond.

When they returned to the grassy plain Poole stalked away to his ship, his head full of anger and fear.