Otherness (35 page)

After Alex went off to bed, Stan stayed behind and played with his friends, the numbers. He rested very still and used a mental pencil to write them across the window. Equations stitched the Milky Way. It didn't take long to see that Alex was right.

What they had done today was create something out of nothing and then quickly exile that something away again. To Alex and the others, that was that. All ledgers balanced. What had been borrowed was repaid. At least as far as this universe of matter and energy was concerned.

But something
was
different, dammit! Before, there had been virtual fluctuations in the vacuum. Now,
somewhere
, a tiny cosmos had been born.

And suddenly Stan remembered something else. Something called "inflation." And in this context the term had nothing to do with economics.

Some theorists hold that our own universe began as a very, very big fluctuation in the primordial emptiness. That during one intense instant, superdense mass and energy burst forth to begin the expansion of all expansions
.

Only there could not have been anywhere near enough mass to account for what we now see . . . all the stars and galaxies
.

"Inflation" stood for a mathematical hat trick . . . a way for a medium or even small-sized bang to leverage itself into a great big one. Stan scribbled more equations on his mental blackboard and came to see something he hadn't realized before.

Of course. I get it now. The inflation that took place twenty billion years ago was no coincidence. Rather, it was a natural result of that earlier, lesser creation. Our universe must have had its own start in a tiny, compressed ball of matter no heavier than . . . no heavier than
. . .

Stan felt his heartbeat as the figure seemed to glow before him.

No heavier than that little "pocket cosmos" we created today
.

He breathed.

That meant that somewhere, completely out of touch or contact, their innocent experiment might have . . .
must
have . . . initiated a beginning. A universal beginning.

Fiat lux
.

Let there be light.

"Oh my God," he said to himself, completely unsure which of a thousand ways he meant it.

With a stunned sensation of irony and wonder, Stan looked out into the blackness, through the cold glass. He could not point toward the new thing he had witnessed being born . . . in effect, his creation. Its blazing destiny now lay beyond all reach in space, time, and dimension.

So he chose a direction at random—where a faint scattering distant spirals drifted patiently—and lifted his hand in a gesture of benediction, casting what blessing he could offer into the endless night.

Black. As deep as night is black between the stars.

Deeper
than that. Night isn't really black, but a solemn, utter shade of red.

As black, then, as Tenembro Nought, which drinks all color, texture, substance, from around it, giving back only its awful depth of presence.

But no. She had found redness of an immeasurably profound hue, emerging from that awful pit in space. Not even the singularity was pure enough to typify true blackness. Nor was Isola's own dark mood, for that matter—although, since the visitors' arrival, she had felt smothered, robbed of illumination.

In comparison a mere ebony luster of skin and hair seemed too pallid to dignify with the term "black." Yet, those traits were much sought after on Pleasence World, one of many reasons a fetch ship had come all this way to claim the new life within her.

The fetus might know blackness
, Isola thought, laying a hand over her curved abdomen, feeling a stirring there. She purposely used cool, sterile terms, never calling it "baby," or a personalized "she." Anyway, when is a fetus's sensory innervation up to "knowing" anything at all? Can one who has never seen light comprehend blackness?

Leaning towards the dimly illuminated field-effect mirror, Isola touched its glass-smooth, silky-cool, pseudo-surface. Peering at her own reflection, she found at last what she was looking for.

That's it. Where light falls, never to emerge again
.

Isola brought her face closer still, centering on one jet pupil, an inky well outlined by a dark iris—the universe wherein she dwelled.

"It is said nothing escapes from inside a black hole, but that isn't quite so."

Mikaela was well into her lecture when Isola slipped into the theatre, late but unrepentant. A brief frown was her partner's only rebuke for her tardiness. Mikaela continued without losing a beat.

"In this universe of ours, the rules seem to allow exceptions even to the finality of great noughts. . . ."

Isola's vision adapted and she discreetly scanned the visitors—six space travelers whose arrival had disrupted a quiet, monastic research routine. The guests from Pleasence World lounged on pseudo-life chaises overlooking Mikaela and the dais. Each sleek-furred settee was specially tuned to the needs of its occupant. While the three humans in the audience made little use of their couch amenities—only occasionally lifting fleshy tubes to infuse endorphin-laced oxygen, the squat, toadlike Vorpal and pair of slender Butins had already hooked up for full breathing symbiosis.

Well, they must have known they were coming to a rude outpost station, built with only a pair of humans in mind. Isola and Mikaela had not expected guests until a few months ago, when the decelerating starship peremptorily announced itself, and made its needs known.

Those needs included the use of Isola's womb.

"Actually, there are countless misconceptions about gravitational singularities, especially the massive variety formed in the recoil of a supernova. One myth concerns the possibility of communicating across a black hole's event horizon, to see what has become of all the matter which left this universe so violently and completely, long ago."

Mikaela turned with a flourish of puffy sleeves towards the viewing tank. Winking one eye, she called up a new image to display in midair, above the dais. Brilliance spilled across Mikaela's fair skin and the visitors' multihued faces, causing several to flinch involuntarily. Isola smiled.

Titanic fields enveloped and deformed a tortured sun, dragging long shreds of its substance towards a spinning, flattened whirlpool—a disc so bright it searingly outshone the unfortunate nearby star.

"Until now, most investigations of macro-black holes have concentrated on showy cases like this one—the Cygnus A singularity—which raises such ferocious tides on a companion sun as to tear it apart before our eyes. In galactic cores greedy mega holes can devour entire stellar clusters. No wonder most prior expeditions were devoted to viewing noughts with visible accretion discs. Besides, their splashy radiance makes them easy to find."

Isola watched the victim star's tattered, stolen essence spiral into the planate cyclone, which brightened painfully despite attenuation by the viewing software. Shimmering, lambent stalks traced magnetically directed plasma beams, jetting from the singularity north and south. As refulgent gas swirled inward, jostling and heating, it suddenly reached an inner lip—the edge of a black circle, tiny in diameter but awesome in conclusiveness. The Event Horizon.

Spilling across that boundary, the actinic matter vanished abruptly, completely. Once over the edge, it was no longer part of reality. Not
this
reality, anyway.

Mikaela had begun her lecture from a basic level, since some of the visitors weren't cosmogonists. One of these, Jarlquin, the geneticist from Pleasence, shifted on her chaise. At some silent order, a pseudo-life assistant appeared to massage her shoulders. Petite, even for a starfarer, Jarlquin glanced towards Isola, offering a conspiratorial smile. Isola pretended not to notice.

"Most massive noughts don't have stars as close neighbors, nor gas clouds to feed them so prodigiously and make them shine." Closing one eye again, Mikaela sent another command. In a flickered instant, the ostentatious display of stellar devouring was replaced by serene quiet. Cool, untroubled constellations spanned the theatre. Tenembro Nought was a mere ripple in one quadrant of the starry field, unnoticed by the audience until Mikaela's pointer drew attention to its outlines. A lenslike blur of distortion, nothing more.

"Solitary macrosingularities like Tenembro are far more common than their gaudy cousins. Standing alone in space, hungry, but too isolated to draw in more than a rare atom or meteoroid, they are also harder to find. Tenembro Nought was discovered only after detecting the way it bent light from faraway galaxies.

"The black hole turned out to be perfect for our needs, and only fifty-nine years, shiptime, from the colony on Kalimarn."

Under Mikaela's mute guidance, the image enlarged. She gestured towards a corner of the tank, where a long, slender vessel could be seen, decelerating into orbit around the cold dimple in space. From the ship's tail emerged much smaller ripples, which also had the property of causing starlight to waver briefly. The distortion looked similar—though on a microscopic scale—to that caused by the giant nought itself. This was no coincidence.

"Once in orbit, we began constructing research probes. We converted our ship's drive to make tailored microsingularities. . . ."

At that moment a tickling sensation along her left eyebrow told Isola that a datafeed was queued with results from her latest experiment. She closed that eye with a trained squeeze denoting ACCEPT. Implants along the inner lid came alight, conveying images in crisp focus to her retina. Unlike the digested pap in Mikaela's presentation, what Isola saw was in real time . . . or as "real" as time got, this near a macro-black hole.

More rippling images of constellations. She subvocally commanded a shift to graphic mode; field diagrams snapped over the starry scene, showing Tenembro's mammoth, steepening funnel in space-time. An uneven formation of objects—miniscule in comparison—skimmed towards glancing rendezvous with the great nought's eerily bright-black horizon. Glowing traceries depicted one of the little objects as another space-funnel. Vastly smaller, titanically narrower, it too possessed a centre that was severed from this reality as if amputated by the scalpel of God.

". . . with the objective of creating ideal conditions for our instruments to peer down . . ."

Columns of data climbed across the scene under Isola's eyelid. She could already tell that this experiment wasn't going any better than the others. Despite all their careful calculations, the camera probes still weren't managing to straddle between the giant and dwarf singularities at the right moment, just when the black discs touched. Still, she watched that instant of grazing passage, hoping to learn something—

The scene suddenly shivered as Isola's belly gave a churning lurch, provoking waves of nausea. She blinked involuntarily and the image vanished.

The fit passed, leaving her short of breath, with a prickle of perspiration on her face and neck. Plucking a kerchief from her sleeve, Isola dabbed her brow. She lacked the will to order the depiction back. Time enough to go over the results later, with full-spectrum facilities.

This is getting ridiculous
, Isola brooded. She had never imagined, w hen the requisition request came, that a simple clonal pregnancy would entail so many inconveniences!

". . . taking advantage of a loophole in the rules of our cosmos, which allow for a slightly offset boundary when the original collapstar possessed either spin or charge. This offset from perfection is one of the features we hope to exploit. . . ."

Isola felt a sensation of being watched. She shifted slightly. From her nearby pseudo-life chaise, Jarlquin was looking at Isola again, with a measuring expression.

She might have the courtesy to feign attention to Mikaela's presentation
, Isola thought, resentfully.
Jarlquin seems more preoccupied with my condition than I am
.

The Pleasencer's interest was understandable, after having come so far just for the present contents of Isola's womb.
My anger with Jarlquin has an obvious source. Its origin is the same as my own
.

An obsession with beginnings had brought Isola to this place on the edge of infinity.

How did the universe begin
?

Where did it come from
?

Where do
I
come from
?

It was ironic that her search would take her to where creation ended. For while the expanding cosmos has no "outer edge" as such, it does encounter a sharp boundary at the rim of a black hole.

Isola remembered her childhood, back on Kalimarn, playing in the yard with toys that made picosingularities on demand, from which she gained her first experience examining the warped mysteries of succinct event horizons. She recalled the day these had ceased to be mere dalliances, or school exercises in propulsion engineering, when they instead became foci for exaltation and wonder.

The same equations that describe an expanding universe also tell of a gravity trough's collapse. Explosion, implosion . . . the only difference lay in reversing time's arrow. We are, in effect, living
inside
a gigantic black hole
!

Her young mind marveled at the implications.

Everything within is aleph. Aleph is cut off from contact with that which is not aleph. Or that which came
before
aleph. Cause and effect, forever separated
.

As I am separated from what brought me into being
.

As I must separate from what I bring into being
. .

The fetus kicked again, setting off twinges, unleashing a flood of symbiotic bonding hormones. One side effect came as a sudden wave of unasked-for sentimentality. Tears filled Isola's eyes, and she could not have made image-picts even if she tried.

Jarlquin had offered drugs to subdue these effects—to make the process "easier." Isola did not want it eased. This could be her sole act of biological creation, given the career she had chosen. The word "motherhood" might be archaic nowadays, but it still had connotations. She wanted to experience them.